Donald Trump will be inaugurated soon enough, and with him he brings a lesson for 2025. As the great essayist Christopher Caldwell noted in the New Statesman late last year, his electoral victory was not so much a question of politics but rather it was a social revolution. After years of the West being under the cosh of so-called “woke” pieties, the voters finally (and roundly) rejected the sensibility. The year 2024 provided the vibe shift and in 2025 it’s time for mainstream politics in Ireland to heed it.
I wrote only two weeks ago that there was a benefit to Ireland’s system being so stagnant and oriented towards the status quo: political stasis and the gravitational pull dragging everyone to the centre insulates the nation from major crisis points. It helped us weather Brexit, for example – a shocking ruction that would have sent a country with less boring politics into domestic meltdown. So, when we look at Europe’s turmoil in 2024 – in many places only set to worsen – we can be grateful to the relative stability afforded by Ireland’s liberal establishment. The danger with this system, I among many others have noted, is that it allows the Government to be complacent, slow to notice when they have drifted from the true feelings of the electorate.
[ Maureen Dowd: Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politicsOpens in new window ]
The Democrats in the United States had certainly drifted far from the electorate, still in 2024 attempting to wage a campaign on progressive strictures, thinking that at the last minute calling Trump a fascist and warning the world he was a threat to democratic values everywhere would work. It didn’t work because those words hold much less power now than they may have once done – neither the fact that Trump is a convicted felon nor his loose relationship with the law mattered a jot to the median voter. The party also sought institutional support from Hollywood, expecting an endorsement from Beyoncé, Oprah and Taylor Swift to push their candidate over the line. It was a profound misreading of the room: as the working-class votes cleaved towards Trump, who thought they could be won back with the gilded and distant elite of Bel Air?
In 2016, the Democrats attempted to beat Trump on a platform of Hillary Clinton being a woman (“I’m with her” perhaps will go down as one of the most poorly conceived campaign slogans of modernity). Her loss didn’t discourage making identity the centrifugal force in leftish politics, however – instead her supporters organised women’s marches, and the so-called Lived Experience of various identitarian groups was upheld as gospel even if it defied all sense of reality and good politics. The worst of this strange decade of peak wokeness is over – evidenced by the fact that even Judith Butler, a foot soldier in the 2010s woke revolution, came to condemn its excesses recently. “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties,” she said.
[ Leo Varadkar could learn something from Jimmy Carter about how to retireOpens in new window ]
[ These four trends reshaped Irish politics in 2024Opens in new window ]
Perhaps I have been beating this drum for too long but the progressive establishment of Ireland needs to pay attention to the political and social weather. I understand this is a lesson derived from America. But the 21st century – thanks to mass and social media – has seen the vibes once specific to individual nations blur; what teenagers in flyover USA say to one another is read and watched by teenagers in northeast England and Cork. Ireland, simply put, is not immune to the shift under way across the global West. The temperature set over the internet is more general than it ever has been.
And so, in Government Buildings – just as is happening in Westminster – I hope the upper echelons are realising this. It is okay to talk critically about immigration policy; to be open to the idea that the voter might be anxious about precipitous demographic change; to be disinterested in the language of college campuses in 2018. I am sure Leo Varadkar’s departure after the two failed referendums was a wake-up call too – the arc of time may well bend toward justice (who knows!) but it certainly doesn’t require referendums to fiddle with the wording of a Constitution deemed to be rhetorically out of touch with modernity. If it is not of direct, obvious and material consequence to the world then perhaps it needn’t be presented as an urgent matter to be resolved.
Ireland’s centre will hold for now, even if across the West the centre is being torn limb from limb (even Keir Starmer’s Labour victory was short-lived at the polls – he is desperately unpopular now). But the language of identity politics general to the 2010s seems now to be a blip, rather than the establishment of a new rule. And it all forces a realisation: politics can be kind, liberal, open-minded, tolerant and inclusive. But it does not have to be – in fact, it shouldn’t be – dictated by strict rules on what can and can’t be said; the elevation of certain identities above others; the idea that observance of rhetorical strictures is more important than measures designed to change material realities: whether that be of the second-generation immigrant, the cosy urban liberal, the Protestant, the Catholic or indeed the white working class.