"There is no escape on earth for man from taxes, toothache, or the statesmanship of Disraeli," Lord Robert Cecil said in 1858 of his fellow Conservative and adversary Benjamin Disraeli. One-hundred and forty-seven years after Cecil announced these words as part of an attack on Disraeli as an enemy of conservatism, David Gelernter wrote these words in the Weekly Standard: "Benjamin Disraeli...inventor of modern conservatism--was a neocon in the plain sense of the word." Gelernter continues: "That modern conservatism should have been invented by a 19th-century neocon is thought provoking." It is thought provoking, if only it were true. Modern conservatism wasn't "invented" by anyone, let alone Disraeli. Disraeli wasn't a neocon, no matter how much some neoconservatives wish to make him one.

One learns more about the author than the subject reading the Weekly Standard piece. Gelernter cherry-picks from Disraeli's career, highlighting the real and imagined commonalities between the 19th-century Disraeli and the 21st-century neoconservatives. Disraeli did expand the franchise and he did obtain the Suez canal for Great Britain, but this hardly makes him the father of global democrats and worshippers of a Pax Americana. How does Disraeli's famous protectionist stand for the Corn Laws, for instance, mesh with neoconservatism?

Disraeli is an admirable figure, but he isn't the father of modern conservatism. Who is? Ironically, Disraeli himself provided a much more plausible answer than Gelernter's. When Queen Victoria elevated Disraeli to the House of Lords, the two-time prime minister not coincidentally appropriated the title: Earl of Beaconsfield.

My gosh this is one of the most poorly written, and even worse argued, essays I have attempted to read in a long time. I couldn't even finish it. Does Kristol's magazine refuse to edit, let alone choose publishable essays?

I want to respond to it but can't figure out how to even begin. Do I ask why Gelernter thinks that oodles of anecdotes and non sequiturs stand in for evidence for his apparent thesis that Disraeli is the father of something called "modern" conservatism? His very first sentence uses the phrase "neocon in the plain sense of the word." Yet, he never tells us what the "plain sense" of the word neocon means? This essay is nearly incomprehensible.

Should I wonder why he thinks he can say things like "modern" conservativism, or that some "conservatives are also progressives" and be understood to be making any sense at all?

Or how about his self-parodying uberzionism and fixation on ethnicity?

Miserable, just miserable.

(By the way Gelernter, Marx was not a "self-hating" Jew, you seem to understand his biography as well as you do Disraeli's.)

Most of all I am struck by his odd equation of "modern conservatism" (whatever that is) and neoconservatism. Self-serving, but very silly. I laughed out loud when I read Dan's headline.

I know little of Disraeli, but I do wish to note, in passing, the wonderful English taste for a dig: "There is no escape on earth for man from taxes, toothache, or the statesmanship of Disraeli." That is one of the most marvelous put-downs ever written. I wish we could do half as well in the States.