The liberals of Ireland have a lot to learn from the United States. In the wake of the US election and Donald Trump’s easier-than-expected victory, the Democrats have gone soul searching. First on the roster of priorities should be a re-evaluation of their relationship with identity politics. Centring the language of race and gender ahead of the material conditions of the working class destined the party to lose to the Maga blue-collar whisperers.
The referendums in Ireland held on March 8th this year point to a similar disconnect between establishment voices and the feeling of the electorate. Ireland’s march to an ever-more-progressive land was complicated as the country rejected the two proposals: one to expand the Constitution’s definition of the family, the other to remove references to women’s duties in the home and add a recognition of care within the family. The Government’s calculation (well, that of all mainstream parties) was that the country would agree to drop the aspects of the Constitution supposedly confined to the 1930s. They were wrong. The first proposal was defeated with 67.7 per cent against; the second with 73.9 per cent.
This disconnect is not just seen at the ballot box but in cultural production too, at least in the US. Focus has been turned to the left-wing establishment’s weakened grip on cultural production. Hollywood is the locus of the liberal starlet who endorses Kamala Harris. The music industry found its Harris champions too. But there is every reasonable suspicion that celebrity endorsement may have harmed more than it helped – James Johnson of JLP Polls, one of the only polling companies who called the race early (and confidently) for Trump, said that even “Taylor Swift’s endorsement was met with total derision and eye rolls in several focus groups I ran.”
America’s so-called coastal elites took the temperature of the country wrong. And instead the kingmakers were the podcasters and right-wing firebrands. Trump decided to take three hours out of his day in the denouement of his campaign to do an interview with Joe Rogan – a calculation of someone who understands that a podcaster who speaks to the everyman resonates at a better frequency than a shiny celebrity sequestered away in the Hollywood hills.
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The answer to this problem, then, should be the Democrat establishment needs to reclaim the cultural ground it has lost. But the problem is deeper than this apparent surface-level shift away from Hollywood to the everyday podcaster. Instead, it has everything to do with the DNA of the left now. James Marriot diagnoses it simply in The Times this week. The blame lies with progressives, many of whom “have had a thrilling time enforcing punishing rules on each other about what is permissible to say and think”. All good art is about rule breaking, he correctly contends, so we should not be surprised that “nobody particularly wants to listen” to the Hollywood pieties, or to the party who claims to advocate for minorities but cannot win their votes.
Ireland can heed these lessons. If the feeling of the electorate – as proven in the recent referendums – is out of kilter with the Government, then ought there be more mainstream voices making the case? Rogan’s cultural weight comes entirely from his instinct to query orthodoxy. So why does mainstream Ireland lack a similar figure? Is the country subject to unusually conformist tastemakers?
Ireland was once unquestioning in its fealty to Rome and the local church. As it entered into its period of rapid liberalisation – the abortion referendum in 2018 was the capstone of the project – it seemed the country was approaching the end of history; liberal, and secular now that God had been laundered from most corners of society. In reality the disposition hasn’t gone away, but it has transformed into new habits: not of brandishing the rosary but instead of brandishing different dogmas; not of admonishing the ungodly but admonishing those in possession of political and social impieties.
I am reminded of last year when many (one estimate went as high as 50,000) took to the streets for the Ireland For All march. It was a direct rebuke to the increasingly frequent anti-migrant agitation, and a supposed victory for tolerance. And it was, I suppose, in a narrow sense. But this newfound open-mindedness did not come bearing an interest in intellectual diversity – in those who might question the immigration figures, or those who might take the non-mainstream opinion on the abortion referendum. I guess (with confidence) they would not be so welcome in these circles.
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One reason the Democrats called it so wrong – so the consensus goes – is because they got too tied up in their own moral universe. And that universe was increasingly drifting away from the voters they needed to court. Meanwhile, those who questioned and deviated from their rhetoric and politics (like the most popular podcaster in the world, Rogan) have gained immense cultural capital over the past decade. In Ireland the permissible framework is narrow too, deviance confined to the fringes. At the end of November, this disconnect might not emerge in the voter tallies. But it is there and it will come back to bite.