Dizzy Parallels

If you enjoy seeing the past reinterpreted through the eyes of the present, then you might want to take a look at David Gelernter's peculiar appreciation of Benjamin Disraeli, published in the February 7 Weekly Standard. By Gelernter's telling, the Reform Act of 1832 left the Tories looking "like 1990s Republicans after a run-in with Bill Clinton." The Conservative Party under Robert Peel's leadership was "like the administration of Richard Nixon, or the views of Northeastern Republicans." Disraeli's rise to power was like "Newt Gingrich taking control of the House Republicans for philosophic reasons but not by philosophic methods." Disraeli himself was "a 19th-century neocon." And then there's this:

As Disraeli saw it, liberals and conservatives were equally progressive. But liberals were rational internationalists who worried what the Germans would say. Conservatives were romantic nationalists who worried what their forefathers would have said. (Thus "national" Republicans invoke the wisdom of the people and the authority of the Founding Fathers. "Philosophic" Democrats invoke the wisdom of the intellectuals and the authority of the United Nations.)

Those modern comparisons are to be expected, I suppose, since the article's not-particularly-hidden agenda is to present a creation myth for Weekly Standard-style conservatism.