Time Essay: Richard Nixon: An American Disraeli?

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Both Nixon and Disraeli were capable of dazzling conversions. Almost overnight, Nixon changed from a budget balancer to a Keynesian. After helping to bring down his own Tory government in 1846 because it proposed abolishing the Corn Laws that protected Britain's landed interests, Disraeli switched to a free-trade position. He made another turnabout when, faced with Liberal plans to extend the franchise to the workingman, he steered his own election bill through Parliament. The liberalism of 19th century England was in many respects the exact opposite of 20th century American liberalism; it was essentially laissez-faire. But both Disraeli and Nixon rejected the assumptions of liberalism, then and now: a faith in utilitarian reform, an easy optimism, a hankering for change. Said Disraeli: "In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary doctrines." He compared the "national system" of the tradition-minded Tories with the "philosophic system" of the doctrinaire Liberals—a distinction Nixon makes today when he contrasts his New Majority with the "limousine liberals."

In foreign policy particularly, Nixon has demonstrated a Disraeli touch. Disraeli based his foreign policy on a sober, unsentimental appraisal of the national interest. What was good for England, he thought, was good for the world, and it worked out that way—for a time. Disraeli was determined to maintain a balance of power by preventing Russian expansion—as much feared in the 19th century as it came to be in the 20th. To do this, he had to prop up the decaying Ottoman Empire, a policy that outraged Liberals who felt that it was a violation of British principles to support a corrupt regime. To stretch a point or two, Disraeli even had a McGovern hectoring him in the person of Gladstone, the Liberal leader who thundered his righteous indignation at the power politics played behind his back. Gladstone was an inveterate moralizer who, as André Maurois once noted, "was reproached not so much for always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve as for claiming that God had put it there."

No more than Nixon did Disraeli believe in open diplomacy. His backstairs dealings aroused as much opposition. Just as Nixon caused an uproar by selling wheat too cheaply to the Russians, so did Disraeli upset sensibilities by negotiating a loan at 13% from the Rothschilds to buy a major interest for Britain in the Suez Canal. Doubtful though some of his means were, Disraeli achieved his goals. By promoting a general European settlement, he helped maintain the Victorian peace, which was to last longer than any period of peace Europe had known since the early days of the Roman Empire.