Before we start… I know this and last week have been a lot of British, especially for those of you still bearing contempt for the redcoats. But it’s history, and it’s relevant to where we’re going, so temper your anger and frustration and make fun of their silly form of government after we’ve learned what we need to. Okay, let’s begin.
A messenger reached Robert Peel in Rome on the 26th of November, 1834, carrying a summons from the King of England that he had no reason to expect.
Eight days earlier William the Fourth had dismissed Lord Melbourne’s Whig ministry, which remains the last occasion on which a British sovereign has thrown out a sitting prime minister. The Duke of Wellington was holding the government together alone, personally carrying several seals of office, waiting for Peel to cross Europe.
Three weeks after he got to London, Peel published a letter addressed to the voters of a small Staffordshire borough. In it he took the Reform Act of 1832 (changed the British electoral system by redistributing parliamentary seats and expanding the voting franchise to include more middle-class men), the constitutional change he had fought to the last ditch and lost, and described it as a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question.
The modern Conservative Party is conventionally dated from that letter. Which means that the founding document of the oldest continuously operating political party in the world is a concession speech.
Ten years later, a backbench member of Parliament named Benjamin Disraeli wrote a chapter about that letter and asked the question this series is named after. What will you conserve? His own answer was that the Conservatives had learned to defend everything that was established, as long as it was a phrase and not a fact. In other words, conservatives had become good at defending the names, symbols, and language of old institutions while allowing the substance of those institutions to disappear. Sound familiar?
This is the second of four articles. The first was about Burke, and the argument there was that conservatism at its root is a claim about knowledge, and that the half of Burke everyone skips is the half about change. This one is about what happens when somebody takes that philosophy and tries to run a political party on it.
The letter from Tamworth
Peel came home to a government with no majority, kissed hands on the 9th of December as Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and dissolved Parliament on the 30th. The letter is dated the 18th, right in the middle of that, and it was written to win an election.
It’s addressed to the electors of the borough of Tamworth, which was Peel’s own seat. It opens “Gentlemen” and closes “with affectionate regard, most faithfully yours, Robert Peel.” Addresses to your own constituents were routine in 1834, and every member wrote them. What Peel did that nobody had done was hand his to the national press, so that it ran in The Times within days, and he tells you in the document itself that this is the plan. He is making a more public appeal, he writes, by addressing himself, through you, to that great and intelligent class of society of which you are a portion.
Through you. That one preposition is why historians call this the first election manifesto. The constituency letter’s the pretext, and the country is the audience.
Here is the critical sentence:
I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question, a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means.
Note the article, because almost everyone gets it wrong. It’s usually quoted as “the final and irrevocable settlement,” and the indefinite article is doing work. Peel is conceding one question. He isn’t conceding all of them, and he’s leaving himself room to fight the next one.
Then comes the formula that gets called the founding doctrine of British conservatism: a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper, combining the firm maintenance of established rights with the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances. Three clauses, and if you want the operating manual of conservative government in Britain for the next century, that’s it.
Two things get rejected in the same letter, and both are usually quoted in a form slightly stronger than what he wrote. The line about ancient usages gets cited as a general principle, and in context it is a defense of his own record as a reforming Home Secretary, which is precisely what he had been. He appeals to that record as proof that he has not been disposed to acquiesce in acknowledged evils, either from the mere superstitious reverence for ancient usages, or from the dread of labor or responsibility in applying a remedy.
The second rejection is the hinge of the document:
if, by adopting the spirit of the Reform Bill, it be meant that we are to live in a perpetual vortex of agitation; that public men can only support themselves in public estimation by adopting every popular impression of the day... if this be the spirit of the Reform Bill, I will not undertake to adopt it.
A perpetual vortex of agitation, not “a state of perpetual agitation,” which is the usual misquote. And every popular impression of the day, not the popular impression of the day. Peel is saying that we can accept a newness that binds us together, but that doesn’t mean the next newness should be accepted without cause. And he warns that this condition of progress for its own sake creates a perpetual vortex of agitation. Sound familiar?
The problem with the document is one the Oxford Companion to British History notes in the same breath as calling it a foundation text. The formula is silent on who decides. Correction of proved abuses, proved to whom. Redress of real grievances, real by what standard. Firm maintenance of established rights, established when and by whom, and what happens when the right you are maintaining was itself a grievance somebody redressed last time around. Peel gives you a disposition and a tone, but he doesn’t give you a test, and everything that goes wrong for the next two centuries goes wrong through that exact gap.
Burke against Peel
Last time I gave you Burke’s doctrine of reform. Even when I changed, it should be to preserve. Even when I accept reform, the purpose should be to preserve the thing. Change the method? Maybe, but always preserve what the institution should be, our culture, etc. Plus the image that makes it concrete, which is the reparation made as nearly as possible in the style of the building (remember the cathedral metaphor from pt 1).
On a quick read, Peel is that doctrine in office. He accepts a change, insists on repair over replacement (which is a chapter in my upcoming book), and refuses both superstitious reverence and the vortex of agitation. He is Burke with a department and a budget. I want to argue he is doing something different, and that the difference is the whole problem.
Burke’s prudence is philosophical, and Peel’s is administrative.
Burke repairs the cathedral wall because he wants the cathedral. The thing he is preserving is prior to the repair, and it tells him what kind of repair to make. He has an object, and the object constrains the method. This is Aristotle’s physis, that a thing’s nature tells you what it is and dictates its purpose and behavior.
Peel’s accepting a renovation that already happened and can’t be undone, and then declaring that the renovated building is the one he will defend. His object is whatever is standing after the last contractor left. In short, he’s conserving what now exists.
You can see the difference in what triggers a change. For Burke the trigger is a great grievance, and he says so, and the burden sits on the reformer to show real damage or else they can take their reform elsewhere. For Peel in December 1834, the trigger is defeat. The grievance that leads him to the remedy is that he lost the vote, so now he has to live in this new world. That’s a perfectly sensible basis for running a political party, and it isn’t the same thing, and the reason is that losing tells you nothing about whether the thing you lost was good.
Remember too what Burke had that a crude status-quo conservative doesn’t. He had a standard sitting underneath the current settlement. When he broke with his own party in 1791, he was measuring the Whigs against an inherited constitutional tradition and finding them wanting, and he had leverage on his own side precisely because he was not committed to whatever existed. Peel’s formula contains no such standard. That is the loophole again.
Now the best case for Peel, because the case is strong.
He isn’t writing philosophy at all. He’s writing an election address, three weeks into a minority government, under a franchise that had just changed, with a dissolution twelve days out. Judging it as though it were the Reflections is a category error.
More seriously, a political system needs losers who accept legitimate settlements, and that’s not a small thing. We’ve discussed this before about what a Republic is. A party that can’t accept a lost constitutional question becomes a party of permanent restoration, and a party of permanent restoration either stops winning elections or stops being a party (i.e., the modern Democrats). Peel is judging that his side has to be able to lose and continue. If you want to see the alternative, the Continental monarchies ran that experiment through the nineteenth century, and most of them are gone. Consider that before you dump Peel altogether. You may find this concept wishy-washy, but those who went another way (Austria, Prussia) ceased to exist.
Burke did this himself, incidentally. The Revolution of 1688 was a change he treated as settled, and the whole argument of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs is about how to treat it as settled correctly. Accepting a settlement is in the tradition. The question’s what you do afterward.
Because twelve years after Tamworth, he did it again, and the second time it destroyed him.
The Irish famine began in the autumn of 1845 and forced the question of the Corn Laws, the tariff protection on grain and the single most important material interest of the landed men who made up his party. Peel decided they had to go, and carried repeal with Whig votes, Radical votes and his own personal following, against roughly two thirds of his own party. The Importation Act received royal assent on the 26th of June, 1846. That same night his government was defeated on an Irish coercion bill by protectionist Conservatives voting with the Whigs, which was an act of pure revenge. He resigned three days later.
The party split and stayed split. The Peelites survived as a separate faction until 1859, shrinking the whole way. In June of that year, at a meeting in Willis’s Rooms, the Whigs and Radicals and Peelites and Independent Irish combined, brought down Derby’s (Edward Smith-Stanley) government by thirteen votes, and formed the ministry conventionally dated as the birth of the Liberal Party.
So the Peelites ended as Liberals. If you want that in one life, take William Gladstone: Peel’s protégé, Chancellor under a Peelite prime minister, then Chancellor under Palmerston, then Liberal leader in 1867, then Liberal Prime Minister four times, and the Conservative Party’s chief antagonist for the back half of his career.
The man who invented the method split his party with it, and the most talented man he trained in it finished on the other side.
What will you conserve
Disraeli spent the early 1840s on the back benches, having been refused office by Peel in 1841, and I put that first because it’s clear he had a personal motive for what came next. He also happened to be right, and both things can be true.
In 1844 he published Coningsby, and in the middle of it he stops telling the story and writes a straight historical excursus on the Tamworth Manifesto. A novelist halting a novel to analyze a ten-year-old campaign document tells you how much the thing was still living rent free in his head.
There was indeed a considerable shouting about what they called Conservative principles; but the awkward question naturally arose, what will you conserve? The prerogatives of the Crown, provided they are not exercised; the independence of the House of Lords, provided it is not asserted; the Ecclesiastical estate, provided it is regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that is established, as long as it is a phrase and not a fact.
That’s the most dangerous sentence anybody ever wrote about conservatism, and a conservative wrote it, about the founder of his own party, in a novel.
Look at the structure of the charge. He isn’t saying the Conservatives abandoned the Crown, the Lords and the Church. He’s saying something worse. They kept all three in form, conceded all three in substance, and then presented the form as a victory without having done anything. (Sound familiar?) The prerogative stays, as long as nobody uses it. The Lords stay independent, as long as they never assert it. The Church keeps its estate, as long as a committee of laymen runs it.
One chapter later comes an interesting piece of literary malpractice in British political history. Two characters have a brief exchange. Their names are Tadpole and Taper, they are Disraeli’s portraits of party managers, and he means them to be contemptible. Tadpole says the time has gone by for Tory governments and what the country requires is a sound Conservative government. Taper muses on the phrase and translates it: Tory men and Whig measures.
That line has been quoted for a hundred and eighty years as Disraeli’s own recommendation for how to run a conservative party. It sits in dictionaries of quotations under his name, and gets used admiringly. It’s an accusation, put in the mouth of a sleazy party fixer, about the people the author is attacking. The man who wrote it was calling it a fraud, and we adopted it as a strategy. If you want to know how traditions get built, that is how. Somebody’s insult becomes somebody else’s slogan and in a century nobody checks.
By 1845, Disraeli had moved the attack from novels to the floor of the House. On 17 March, in the debate on the agricultural interest, he gave the speech everybody half remembers, and the famous line gets handled badly almost everywhere. I had the Hansard record pulled, so here’s what’s actually in it.
About a page before the end, Disraeli says there is no doubt a difference in the right honorable gentleman’s demeanor as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown, but that this is the old story, and that you must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. That’s column 1027, and it’s the better joke.
Then the speech closes like this:
Dissolve, if you please, the Parliament you have betrayed, and appeal to the people, who, I believe, mistrust you. For me there remains this at least, the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an Organised Hypocrisy.
Three details are worth noticing.
Hansard capitalizes it, both words, with the British spelling. It isn’t an aphorism: everyone quotes it as a flat declarative, and what he actually says is that what remains to him is the opportunity to express publicly his belief that this is so, which is a man who has lost the argument inside his own party saying the only thing left to him is the right to say it out loud. And the courtship line and the hypocrisy line sit about a page apart in the record, though they get printed together constantly as one flourish.
The ratchet
We’ve talked before about the ratchet that only turns in one direction regarding bureaucratic creep. Listen to Peel’s position in December 1834, stated without charity: I opposed this constitutional change, I lost, and I now accept it as final, while reserving the right to oppose the next change on exactly the grounds I have just abandoned.
Run that across a few cycles. Every generation the conservative party opposes something, loses, accepts the loss as settled, then defends it in the next round against people trying to go further. Which means that at any moment, the content of conservatism is whatever the other side achieved about a generation ago. The metaphor’s a ratchet, and the point of a ratchet is that it turns one way. Peel held this position nearly 200 years ago, but consider the immigration positions today of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton versus their positions in the 2008 presidential campaign. We have only moved in one direction, away from conservatism.
This may seem like an anti-conservative position, but people making this argument are mostly conservatives. Disraeli in 1844. Lord Cranborne, who in 1867 resigned from the Cabinet over his own leader’s Reform Bill and published an article in the Quarterly Review titled “The Conservative Surrender.” I don’t have a quote because it’s behind a paywall, but you can find a few if you look.
Keith Joseph made the strategic version in the nineteen-seventies. The middle ground, he argued, is defined by where the parties currently are, so every Labor government drags it leftward, and the Conservatives end up defending the midpoint of somebody else’s movement. The common ground is defined by what the public actually believes, which is a fixed point you can aim at. John Gray’s version is sharper and more recent. His charge isn’t that conservatism concedes too readily. It’s that the Conservative Party became the principal agent of the dissolution it existed to resist.
And then the version you have actually seen, which is eight words long. In June of 2017, my friend Michael Malice posted that conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. The etymologist Barry Popik went looking for an earlier use and found none, so that one’s got a date and an author, which is more than most internet aphorisms manage.
The argument wins in three places. Disraeli’s is unanswerable as description: the prerogative, the Lords, the Establishment, the county franchise and the Union were each defended in form and surrendered in substance, cycle after cycle, and the defenders in each round were people who had opposed the previous surrender and then made peace with it. Hayek’s is the second, and we’ll discuss that soon. The third is Cranborne, and it is devastating. He called the 1867 Act a surrender and quit the Cabinet over it. He then became the third Marquess of Salisbury, led the party that had passed it, and governed Britain for thirteen of the next seventeen years on the franchise he had resigned to oppose. Nobody did that to him. He did it himself.
It loses in three places too. It equivocates, because there is conservatism as a party strategy and conservatism as a philosophical position, and the ratchet is a property of politics. Tamworth is a document about winning an election under a new franchise, and treating it as a philosophical surrender drops it into a category it was never in. Second, as usually stated, the charge cannot be falsified: any concession proves the ratchet, any resistance is dismissed as a delay, and no counterfactual is ever offered. Name the alternative and say what it would have produced, or you’ve got a description of losing with a mechanical metaphor attached. Third, the thesis requires the baseline to move one way, and the record is lumpier. Britain from 1979 to 1990 under Thatcher was a reversal, not just a delay. So was 1922, so was 1951, so was 2016 with Brexit. The thesis has to call those pauses, which is a prediction about the future and something of a commentary on the continuous nature of politics.
There’s also a blunt empirical answer that deserves more weight than it gets, and it belongs to the position most actual conservative politicians hold: that timely concession is conservatism’s method and the thing the party should be proudest of.
For roughly a century after Tamworth the Conservative Party was the most electorally successful party in the democratic world, and over that same period Britain kept its monarchy, kept its upper house in reduced form, kept its established church, kept the Union until 1922, and absorbed three franchise extensions, two world wars and the arrival of a socialist party without a revolution. Austria and Prussia did not try accommodation and are unavailable for comparison because they don’t exist anymore (the country Austria exists, the kingdom does not). If accepting 1832 was the price of that, the ratchet argument owes you an account of the alternative, and “they should have fought harder” is not an account. The question you must ask is, does living to fight another day have value, or should we sink the Titanic? It’s a fair question, but answers vary.
Here is the strongest version in a sentence. The ratchet isn’t a flaw in conservative reasoning so much as the price of being the party of whatever currently exists, and anyone who defends the status quo inherits the previous generation’s defeats as this generation’s heritage. Call that hypocrisy if you like. It’s closer to the arithmetic of the position.
My issue with this is that conservatism isn’t about defending the status quo. Remember Burke - if I change, let it be to preserve. Preserve what? To me, the answer is obvious. We preserve the thing. The country, the culture, the institutions that matter (not government agencies, but churches and lodges), and most importantly the things they provide. We should feel free to reform institutions that are failing to provide the benefit they claim, because it is the benefit that matters.
Disraeli’s turn
Disraeli asked the question, what do we conserve, in 1844 and then had thirty-seven years to answer it, including six as Prime Minister, and what he did with that time is the most instructive thing in this essay.
Start with the novel he wrote the following year. Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations, contains the exchange everybody knows, in which a stranger tells Egremont that the Queen reigns over two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits and thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, and who are not governed by the same laws. The rich and the poor.
That’s the origin of what everybody calls One Nation Conservatism, except that the phrase “one nation” appears nowhere in the novel. Disraeli names two nations and never coins the slogan. The label was popularized in 1950 by a group of Conservative MPs who called themselves the One Nation Group. So the most famous brand in the history of British conservatism turns out to be a twentieth-century retrofit onto a Victorian novel that says something adjacent, but not exact. Last time it was Burke being installed as a founder in the 1880s. This is the same move, ninety years later.
Then the part where he has to answer his own question. In 1866, Russell and Gladstone’s Reform Bill failed and took their government down with it. Derby and Disraeli came in as a minority administration, and in February 1867 Disraeli brought in a bill of his own. He then accepted amendment after amendment from the radicals, including one from a backbencher named Hodgkinson in May that did more than anything else to widen it, and ended up carrying a measure substantially more democratic than the one Gladstone had failed with. It received royal assent on the 15th of August, 1867, extending the borough franchise to all male householders paying rates. Before the Act, roughly one million of seven million adult men in England and Wales could vote. The Act doubled it immediately. Three Cabinet ministers resigned, one of them Cranborne.
Twenty-two years after calling a conservative government an organized hypocrisy for accepting the other side’s settlement, Disraeli accepted the other side’s settlement, went way further than they had dared, and the reformers expected, and he did it to win. I don’t offer that as a gotcha. It’s the strongest evidence for the thesis of this article, and it comes from the man who wrote the indictment.
And his successors keep doing it. Salisbury, who was Cranborne, argued both sides of the ratchet across a single career and ended up governing on the thing he had resigned to oppose. Baldwin, in 1925, had a majority of over two hundred and a bill in front of him that would have cut off the trade-union money funding the Labour Party, and he killed it from his own benches.
The disposition and its critics
Two men in the middle of the twentieth century tried to answer Disraeli properly and reached opposite conclusions, and the argument between them is where the live fight still sits.
Michael Oakeshott opens his 1956 essay by telling you what he isn’t doing. His theme, he says, is not a creed or a doctrine but a disposition. Then he describes it, in the most quoted paragraph in twentieth-century conservative writing: to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
The sentence that does the real work is the one almost nobody quotes:
A disposition to be conservative in politics does not entail either that we should hold these beliefs to be true or even that we should suppose them to be true.
Oakeshott is cutting conservatism loose from natural law, from divine providence, from organic society, from original sin, from the whole metaphysical scaffolding Burke assumed and Roger Scruton would later insist on. You can have the disposition without a word of it. His account of government follows: not to tutor people, not to improve them, not to galvanize them, not to lead them. The office of government is merely to rule, and the image of the ruler is an umpire administering the rules of a game he does not play.
That answers the ratchet, because a disposition has no fixed substantive content by design and cannot be convicted of abandoning content it never claimed. Peel comes out of this account as a man exercising a preference for the tried over the untried, in circumstances where the tried had just changed and with the assumption it changed for a reason. And it fails, because it makes conservatism unlosable, which is a suspiciously convenient property for a position that keeps losing. If no defeat can count against you, you are not making a claim about reality, you’re doing that other thing… “as long as it is a phrase and not a fact…”
Which brings us to the sharpest thing written on any of this, by a man refusing the label. Friedrich Hayek put an essay called “Why I Am Not a Conservative” at the back of The Constitution of Liberty in 1960:
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.
That is the ratchet argument in one sentence, written by an economist, and it’s better than any version the conservatives produced themselves. He goes further, and this one should sting: in general, he says, the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. That is a direct assault on the current push by conservatives to seize government power for their own.
Hayek declines the conservative label, rejects “libertarian” as an ugly word, and settles on being an unrepentant Old Whig, claiming the lineage of Burke and Madison.
Hayek claims Burke in an essay explaining why he is not a conservative. Scruton claims Burke in a book explaining why conservatism cannot be a species of liberalism. Both are serious men reading the same author, and they mean incompatible things by him. Scruton is the one who supplies what Oakeshott refused, resting the thing on authority, allegiance and tradition, and his simplest sentence is his best. Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created. If you want a content-bearing answer to Disraeli’s question, that’s the most serious one available. It has an object, and the object is the inherited home.
Which leaves the question people actually want settled, and the research on it surprised me. Did Thatcher restore this tradition or break with it?
Her own answer was unambiguous and she gave it repeatedly. In a lecture in 1996, she said the kind of Conservatism she favored would best be described as liberal in the old-fashioned sense, and that she meant the liberalism of Mr Gladstone and not of the latter-day collectivists. She said on another occasion that if Gladstone were alive she would bet on him applying to join the Conservative Party. Milton Friedman put it flatly: she is not in terms of belief a Tory, she is a nineteenth-century Liberal.
And here is the finding that was new to me. In July 1977 she gave the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture, titled “Dimensions of Conservatism,” which is as close as she came to a formal statement of what the word meant. In it, she names Adam Smith, Archbishop Temple, Lord Acton and Bastiat. She does not mention Burke, or Peel, or Disraeli. Her 1996 lecture does the same thing, reaching past the party’s own tradition to Christianity, Greece and Rome. Her genealogy runs through political economy and not through the Conservative Party. That is, we must conserve our inheritance, something that was passed to us, and the party is just one means of doing this. Not just antiquity like our Greek and Roman and Christian background, but where it led: to British liberty. That is the inheritance we must conserve.
Conversely, Shirley Robin Letwin argued that Thatcherism was a moral project about restoring the vigorous virtues, continuous with a conservative tradition of character and not with a liberal tradition of markets. T. E. Utley said there was no such thing as Thatcherism at all, because free markets had been a more or less permanent ingredient of Conservative philosophy going back through Churchill. Her own Defense Secretary, John Nott, said it is a complete misreading of her beliefs to depict her as a nineteenth-century Liberal. And in that same 1977 lecture she said something no pure classical liberal would say, that the Conservative Party is an integral part of the British tradition, not to be explained in abstract terms, but as part of the living flesh of British life over the generations.
Still, look at what she thought she was conserving. Her answer, every time, was a moral capacity. Choice, responsibility, the family, the conditions under which a person can be a moral agent at all. She placed her confidence in individuals, families, businesses and neighborhoods more than in the State. The State exists to recognize our rights and protect our free expression of them, and that is all.
Now go back and read Peel’s list. Established rights, the civil and ecclesiastical institutions, respect for prescriptive authority. The two lists barely overlap. Hers has no Crown in it, no Lords, no established Church, no counties, no professions, no universities. That isn’t a criticism of her, it’s a measurement, and maybe some indication of how the concept of conservatism evolved over that 140 years.
The assignment
However you feel about the ratchet, Peel’s method works, and that fact sits underneath this whole article. Accepting lost settlements kept a party alive through three franchise extensions and two world wars, and kept a constitution intact that most of Europe lost. Most of those countries no longer exist in the same form.
And Disraeli’s question has never been answered. Not by Disraeli, who went on to out-reform the reformers. Not by Salisbury, who denounced a surrender and then governed on it. Not by Oakeshott, who answered it by declining to have an answer. Not by Thatcher, who changed the subject to a different set of things worth keeping. Everything that is established, as long as it is a phrase and not a fact. A hundred and eighty years later it still lands, and the reason it lands is that it is a question in the present tense. Only whoever holds the position right now can answer it.
Three things to do with that this week.
Read the Tamworth Manifesto for yourself. It takes ten minutes, it is free online, and it is the clearest short statement of the governing disposition of the English-speaking right that exists. Read it and ask at every clause who decides. Who decides what counts as a proved abuse. Who decides what makes a grievance real. The document won’t tell you, and finding that gap yourself is worth more than hearing me describe it.
Next, name a settlement you have lost and accepted. Not one you never cared about. One you fought, and lost, and now treat as part of the scenery. Everybody has at least one, most people have never said it out loud, and you’ll learn something from how hard it is to say.
Then, name a settlement you refuse to accept, put it next to the first, and say what makes them different in principle instead of in preference. That’s the test Peel failed to specify, and Disraeli failed to pass. If the only difference between the thing you have accepted and the thing you are still fighting is how much you happen to care, what you have is a mood with a schedule.
But if you can state the difference in principle, you have done something that neither the founder of the Conservative Party nor its sharpest critic managed to do in writing.
Next: America, which had no monarchy, no hereditary aristocracy, no established national church and no unwritten constitution. What American conservatives have to conserve is a founding that was itself a revolution, built on exactly the kind of abstract universal claim Burke spent a book attacking.