Here and There

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
—The late American journalist and satirist P.J. O’Rourke

One day. It was literally from one day to the next that we finally got past U.S. Election Day 2024 on the 5th of November—only to have the date of Ireland’s general election confirmed on the 6th. The campaigning here officially began two days later when a government minister signed an order to hold the election once the taoiseach (prime minister) visited the home of the Irish president to ask him to dissolve the Dáil (lower house of parliament). The election will be held on the 29th.

That seems mercifully brief when compared to the marathon Squid Game that is the American electoral process. In reality, in Ireland as in the U.S. the campaigning for the next election never really stops. The difference is that in the U.S. the date of the next general election and all future elections are known years, decades and, theoretically, centuries in advance, as presidential and congressional terms are fixed by the constitution. Under the parliamentary system in Ireland (also typical of most other countries), taoisigh (that’s the plural of taoiseach) have wide discretion to call elections—as long as it happens within a five-year window following a new Dáil’s first meeting. So, nobody knows for sure when the next election will be until a few weeks before.

Given how the American electoral process itself has become a campaign issue in recent times, it’s interesting to compare and contrast how things work here as opposed to there. For one thing, virtually all voting in Ireland will take place on a single day. There is no early voting, and everyone will vote in person. Except for a few specific circumstances voting by mail is not allowed. In the recent U.S. election, I voted in the state of Washington by downloading and printing a ballot and then mailing it to the county elections office in the U.S. By contrast, Irish citizens living abroad (like my daughter) simply do not get to vote unless they happen to be back home for a visit. And yes, Irish polling places do require voters to show identification.

After the polls close in Ireland, ballots are all counted by hand. This means it can takes days for the final results to be known, although it has to be said the poll workers are impressively efficient under the circumstances. Of course, hand-counting works better in a small country than it would in a massive one like the U.S. Interestingly, Ireland did try using electronic voting machines (manufactured in the Netherlands) on a trial basis back in 2002, but it proved controversial. It was leftist parties with the loudest concerns, mainly over the lack of an audit mechanism or paper trail. An independent commission was established to study the matter, and it ultimately recommended against the machines. The nail in the coffin came when a group of Dutch hackers demonstrated how easily they could infiltrate and change the electronic tallies.

In the end, the 7,000 machines purchased by the government for €54.6 million (including €3 million euro of charges for storing them for five years) were scrapped—much to the government’s embarrassment

As far as I know, Ireland has never attempted postal voting, but another country where I once lived used to have it. Mail-in voting was allowed in France from 1958 to 1975 at which point it was banned because of instances of fraud. These days proxy (i.e. absentee) voting is allowed in France for those with a legitimate reason as to why they cannot vote in person, and more recently internet voting has been introduced for citizens living abroad.

One reason that Irish ballots take so long to count is because of the country’s complicated voting system. It is called “proportional representation with a single transferable vote” (PR-STV). Some states in the U.S. are trying out this system, calling it ranked-choice voting (RCV). Several have employed it for local elections, and some (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and the District of Columbia) have used it or plan to use it for federal and statewide elections.

Meanwhile, several other states have passed or attempted to pass laws banning RCV. The argument against it is that it is overly complicated and confusing for voters.

There is definitely a learning curve to this way of voting, but the Irish seemed to have embraced PR-STV and are quite happy with it. The main advantage is that it eliminates the need for runoff rounds. You are essentially voting in the first and second rounds—and possibly even more—all at the same time.

Voters rank their first-choice candidate as No. 1 and then, optionally, any other candidates on the ballot as 2, 3, etc. (This is why Irish election posters don’t just ask for your vote; they ask for your No. 1 preference.) Ballots are counted and, if no candidate’s first preferences have exceeded 50 percent, then ballots are re-counted as many as necessary, each time removing the lowest vote-getter and distributing his or her votes according to their preferences for No. 2, No. 3, etc. This continues until someone exceeds 50 percent—or until all preferences are exhausted, at which point the highest vote-getter is declared the winner.

This definitely seems to result in a better reflection of the voters’ wishes than the British method. The UK uses a system called single member plurality or, more commonly, first-past-the-post. A single round of voting is held, and whoever gets the most votes—even if it is not a majority—wins. In a country with three major political parties, this results in some skewed results. For example, in the British general election held in July, the Labour Party received 33.7 percent of the nationwide vote yet was rewarded with 63.2 percent of the seats in Parliament, making the party’s leader Keir Starmer the Prime Minister.

Ireland’s system seems more representative than that, but it is prone its own strange results. In the 2020 general election, the party with the most votes was Sinn Féin (erstwhile political arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army) with 24.5 percent of the first-preference votes. Because Sinn Féin had no prospect of forming a coalition to achieve a working majority, the government was instead formed by longtime political enemies Fianna Fáil (22.2 percent) and Fine Gael (20.9 percent) along with the Green Party (7.1 percent). In turn, that resulted in two rotating taoisigh during the government’s term, meaning that at no point was there a government leader whose party had received more than 22.2 percent of voters’ first preferences.

I bear all of the above in mind whenever Irish or British people insist to me that the U.S.’s Electoral College is a crazy way to pick a nation’s leader.

Non-consecutive

 Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
 He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1976

Here’s me raising my head out of my bunker, blinking in the daylight, and asking, “Is the election over yet?”

Asking that right now in Ireland amounts to a mean trick. No sooner are we finally past the interminable season of American electoral politics, but an election is called here in the republic. Mercifully, the campaigning here lasts a mere three weeks, and the votes will be cast by the end of the month. Not that politicians and pundits haven’t been angling for years—or that the media have not been publishing regular polling outcomes—with an eye on the next electoral go-round, but law and custom restricts Irish politics from doing much overt politicking and campaigning outside of these few weeks. That just feels civilized.

There are many contrasts and comparisons to be made between U.S. elections and European ones generally (and Irish ones specifically), and I expect to do that one of these days, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what to say about the American result? Clearly, the public’s emotional and intellectual reactions are every bit as polarized as their debating and pontificating were during the long campaign. Nothing feels settled. As with every election, one side now has the ascendancy, and the other has serious processing to do about what went wrong and how to go forward. That’s even more true than usual this time around, as the result was pretty darn decisive, belying how narrowly divided we kept being told the voters’ intentions were.

Out of curiosity, I went back and re-read what I wrote at this point eight years ago, the first time Donald Trump was elected. What stood out was the sense of utter surprise. I suppose that marks some kind of progress that this time around, while journalists were unable (nor should they have been able) to tell us who would win, the public were not misled about what to expect as much as they were eight years ago. That doesn’t mean some of the public reactions in social and other media haven’t been every bit as extreme as that other time, nobody seems to have been blindsided by anything other than their own heartfelt hopes.

Back then, I observed that Republicans benefited electorally from a nomination process that enabled an unruly, messy, sometimes angry grassroots. Democrats had a more top-down process that made the eventual nominee seem inevitable from the beginning. Of course, that would have been normal enough this time, given that the party had an incumbent president determined to be reelected. Circumstances, however, resulted instead in a nominee that did not participate in a single primary in the 2024 cycle. The miracle is, given that situation, that Kamala Harris did as well as she did.

Should I feel prescient that I also pointed out that the Republican field of primary candidates back then actually seemed more diverse than the Democratic one? Yes, America has once again missed its chance for its first female president (and one of color), but I just heard someone on ABC News point out that this time one out of three people “of color” (whatever that means exactly) voted for Trump. Democrats did themselves no favors presuming that certain demographic groups owed them their votes.

In my eight-year-old post, I also offered what I called “a silver lining” to those fearing an impending dark cloud of a Trump presidency. I probably should have foreseen that it would only annoy those it was meant to comfort, but I feel vindicated.

“If you believe that there is way too much money in politics and that deep pockets are determinative,” I wrote, “then you should take comfort that the candidate who set an all-time record for the most money collected and spent lost and that the candidate who set a new benchmark for low campaign spending won.”

Democrats used to talk about campaign finance reform all the time. Not so much anymore. Now they are the party of big political money. Their presidential candidate outspent the winner by three to one, yet lost the popular tally by more than 3 million votes. No matter how you feel about that result, you have to take encouragement from this proof that money is not necessarily determinative in elections.

By contrast, my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people determined to escape their Trump nightmare by emigrating might be happier in Canada than in Europe may not have aged as well. Eight years later, Justin Trudeau is still Canada’s prime minister but may not be much longer. A BBC piece last week reported he’s under intense pressure to step down, as his Liberals have been trailing the Conservatives in polling by a wide margin for months. It compared his troubles to those of Vice-President Harris in terms of a majority population feeling their country is moving in the wrong direction.

So, is Europe a better destination? Well, that’s a long story. As I said, stay tuned.

Past and Present

This was given to me by one of these guys, right here. He was a hell of a rugby player. He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.
 —President Biden speaking of his distant cousin Rob Kearney and confusing the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, with a brutal British military force of a century ago, in Dundalk on April 12

In Belfast this past week, there was a reunion of major figures commemorating the quarter-century anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (called the Belfast Agreement by Unionists). The hosts were Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, by virtue of being head of government of the United Kingdom of which Northern Ireland is part, and Hillary Clinton, as chancellor of Queen’s University, which hosted the event.

Prominent attendees included former U.S., British and Irish heads of government, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, who were key participants in negotiating the agreement credited with ending Northern Ireland’s violent period known as the Troubles. Also on hand was Gerry Adams, whose pivotal role had been to bring the insurgent Provisional Irish Republican Army on board even while ostensibly denying that he had any connection to them.

Tributes and testimonials were paid to key figures no longer with us, including Nobel Peace Prize winners John Hume and David Trimble, major Nationalist and Unionist political leaders of the time who risked everything for peace and whose political parties subsequently paid the price of perpetual exile in the electoral wilderness. Ironically, political benefit was reaped instead by more extreme parties led by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, both of whom are also no longer with us.

Particularly inspirational among the guests was former U.S. Senator George Mitchell who, at 89 and in poor health, made the journey to Belfast. He did more than any other outsider to bring the various parties together for the historic accord.

The anniversary exercise was in turns moving, nostalgic, edifying and educational, particularly for a generation that has come of age since those days. It is once again a tricky time in the North—it’s always a tricky time in the North—as the main products of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its meticulous power-sharing arrangement, have not functioned for 31 months since it was brought down by the Democratic Unionist Party over unhappiness over the UK implementation of Brexit. Elections were held nearly a year ago which saw, for the first time, saw Sinn Féin overtake the DUP as the largest party, putting Michelle O’Neill in line to become the North’s first ever First Minister.

Despite a new agreement negotiated by Sunak between the UK and the European Union that goes as far as the DUP could realistically hope for, the unionists still refuse to go back into government. Nationalists suspect, not unreasonably, that unionists simply don’t want to go back into a government they would no longer be in charge of.

Many hoped that the DUP would feel pressure to revive the assembly amid all the attention brought about the Good Friday anniversary. Frankly, though, the DUP didn’t get where it is by paying attention to opinions and attitudes outside its own community.

There were hopes that the logjam might be broken during a mid-April visit by President Biden, ostensibly also to commemorate the Good Friday accord. It quickly became apparent, however, that the chief purpose of Biden’s trip was to indulge in a nostalgic plastic-paddy victory lap. He spent the briefest amount of time possible in Northern Ireland, giving a perfunctory speech at Ulster University’s new campus, before heading to the republic for several days of visits to his ancestral homes in Louth and Mayo, bringing along a huge delegation of U.S. government officials and family members, including his sister Valerie and his son Hunter.

At each stop, including an address to the two houses of the Irish parliament (Oireachtas), he gave a variation of the same emotional, rambling speech. There were the obligatory platitudes about peace and the future and doing the right thing, but mostly it was about himself. How much he loved Ireland. How much he missed his mother and wished she could be there. How at home he felt—at least until the last night when he said he couldn’t wait to get back to Delaware.

Everywhere he went, he ran late, partially because of necessary rest breaks but also because he seemed determined to shake every last hand in the country, kiss every baby and pose for every selfie. The fact is, for all his professed love of Ireland, he can’t hold to a candle to what his contemporary Senator Mitchell accomplished 25 years ago when it really mattered.

At one point in his Oireachtas speech, he became somber, saying, “I’m at the end of my career, not the beginning,” adding, “The only thing I bring to this career—and you can see, how old I am—is a little bit of wisdom.”

Biden didn’t sound like someone getting ready for another presidential campaign. By the time he finished the tour in the Mayo town of Ballina, however, with a speech that followed an impressive array of Irish musical talent, he seemed newly energized. Yes, it was more or less the same speech we had heard a couple times before on this trip, but it had more pep this time.

The over-excited Irish press speculated he might actually announce his reelection bid in Ballina. It was amusing to see the country collectively go all fanboy crazy for yet another Irish-American presidential visit. On the ground, though, real people were a bit more measured. They marveled at the vast expense to bring so many people from the U.S. for what amounted to a personal holiday. Even in our own corner of the countryside, we did not escape the roar of the presidential tour in the form of overlying Chinook helicopters.

Perhaps the best example of Mayo practicality came from radio presenter/podcaster Laurita Blewitt, one of the president’s many distant cousins here. Her husband, a well known sports pundit, recounted her exchange with Biden during a banquet in Dublin Castle.

In his usual impulsive manner, the unfailingly affable president said to her, “Laurita, you guys have gotta come with us to Knock [Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in Mayo] on Air Force One tomorrow.”

Her reply: “I can’t. I have to get my hair done in Foxford at 11 am.”

Another son of the auld sod

After 15 Grueling House Speaker Votes, America’s Long National Nightmare Can Finally Begin
 —Headline on the satirical news website The Babylon Bee, January 7

It may have taken 15 votes, but Kevin McCarthy finally did become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. His road to this position was long and not always promising. He first got elected to Congress during the Bush 43 Administration as part of the Republican class of 2006 in which he was one of the so-called Young Guns, along with Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. Those two are long gone, but McCarthy somehow managed to adapt, survive and hang on through the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus and the winds of change that elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

There is much to ponder about the constitutionally prescribed process that resulted in so many ballots for Speaker becoming necessary. Much of the press coverage focused on the fact that such a number was unprecedented—unless you went back a century. There were suggestions that this was symptomatic of fundamental disarray in the Republican Party, if not in the entire U.S. political system. Perhaps it is, but such wrangling after national legislative elections is not unusual in other countries.

For example, here in Ireland, as I wrote three years ago, the 2020 general election resulted in three different political parties having a theoretical shot at forming a government but only after a complicated negotiation for a coalition. Voters went to the polls on February 8, and though the results were quickly known, it was not until June 27 that Micheál Martin was sworn in as Taoiseach, roughly equivalent to Speaker of the House in the U.S. system. The following year, the Netherlands took nearly 10 months of negotiations to form a government after its parliamentary elections.

In other words, protracted post-election negotiations are often the norm in many countries. Usually in the U.S., though, because there are only two viable national parties, such negotiations tend to happen mostly out of the glare of intense press coverage. After the 2020 U.S. elections, Democrats had a similarly thin margin in the House, but they managed to make all their intra-party deals before the official vote for Speaker. Is that better than how the Republicans did it? Is it preferable to keep political messiness more out of the voters’ view or is there some value in having the in-fighting in public view?

As it happens, I have a couple of strange connections to the new Speaker of the House, and not just deriving from the fact he and I were both born in Bakersfield, California.

I do not know the man and have never met him, but with a name like Kevin McCarthy he obviously has an Irish connection, and I have a way of running into those. Back in 1998—before McCarthy was first to elected to office (to a seat on the Kern County Community College District Board of Trustees in 2000)—he was in charge of Bakersfield’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. That was the one for which my bride of three days was drafted to be the queen. She was given no choice in the matter by an Irish-American family friend from my home town, who had a penchant for latching onto any visiting Irish people. He had previously secured the parade queen’s crown for the visiting niece of our town’s Irish priest, who hailed from Donegal.

Once McCarthy’s struggle to be elected Speaker began dominating the worldwide airwaves, it was inevitable that local Irish genealogists would go to work. American presidents’ Irish connections have been a fascination here since John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, followed by his sentimental and celebrated visit to Ireland a mere five months before his tragic death. No other U.S. president has had as close a connection to Ireland, but a surprising number of them have at least had Irish in their DNA. Subsequent visits here have been made by Richard Nixon (Quaker roots in Kildare), Ronald Reagan (Antrim, Tipperary), both presidents Bush (Down) and Barack Obama, whose maternal ancestors were traced to the village of Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border. Obama’s visit, in particular, caused great excitement here and to this day is commemorated by an elaborate service station complex called Barack Obama Plaza near Moneygall on the Dublin-to-Limerick motorway.

Nixon’s 1970 visit is of particular interest in this house. It included a visit by First Lady Pat Nixon (born Thelma Catherine Ryan) to meet distant cousins in the South Mayo town of Ballinrobe and to see her “home place” very near where my wife is from. The local story is that the land owner, on short notice, had to locate a likely structure (a mucky old shed as it happened) and quickly clean it up and make it presentable for the visit. Mayo is also home to cousins of President Biden, who (not unlike the man who made my wife a queen) delights in his Irish connections, which also includes cousins in County Louth.

So what have the genealogists come up with for Speaker McCarthy? An article in a local newspaper informs us that his great-grandfather was Jeremiah McCarthy from Cork. It turns out that Jeremiah married a fellow Irish immigrant named Mary Heskin. A 24-year-old widow, she was from a family with 15 children in a South Mayo village. In other words, she was from just down the road from us.

Jeremiah and Mary were married in the Kern County town of Tehachapi, 40 miles from Bakersfield. For some reason our local paper spells the town’s name Tihachiopia.

Too Big to Concur?

Kavanaugh Burns Down His Home Just To Get It Over With
 —Headline on the satirical newspaper web site The Babylon Bee, June 24

Is the United States simply too big to hold together?

Americans, like most everyone else in the world, tend to take the size of their country for granted, but when you live for a while in a smaller country, you begin to notice things. For one thing, a national consensus seems easier to achieve.

For example, let’s take the abortion issue. Historically, Ireland was predominately Catholic, socially conservative country. Yet when social mores evolved, people went to the polls and voted to legalize the procedure through a change to the country’s constitution.

Is there any possibility something like this could happen in the U.S.? It’s hard to imagine, despite the fact that in the U.S. abortion could be legalized (or banned) nationally simply by an act of Congress. The cumbersome constitutional amendment process would not even be necessary.

One of the arguments for overturning the Roe v. Wade precedent was that abortion is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, the issue actually was addressed in the Irish constitution. That document’s 1983 Eighth Amendment said, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

Four years ago Irish voters repealed that amendment, making it possible for their elected representatives to legislate on the issue. That was seen as a huge victory for women’s abortion rights. Ironically, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling, America is now in the same situation as Ireland (abortion being a legislative matter), but because of the different context, it is seen as a setback for women’s abortion rights.

Upon the Eighth’s repeal, Ireland’s government promptly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. That’s pretty standard in Europe. The UK and the Netherlands permit the procedure during the first 24 weeks, and Sweden 18 weeks. Other countries range between 10 and 14, except Malta, where abortion is outlawed altogether, and Poland, where it’s allowed only in the case of rape, incest or saving the mother’s life.

Ireland’s law actually matches fairly closely the general U.S. opinion. Polls have consistently shown Americans favor legal abortion during the first trimester but not in the second or third ones. So why doesn’t Congress or state legislators simply put that into law? Why does the public debate always seem to be conducted between those who either want abortion banned entirely and those who want it guaranteed until the day before a baby’s birth?

Simply put, it’s hard to compromise when your position is tied to your core beliefs about humanity. If you truly believe a zygote has a human soul, then you’re going to consider its elimination murder. That makes it a public matter. If you believe that a woman’s physical autonomy is paramount, then you’ll conclude the fate of a zygote, embryo or fetus is a concern only for the woman carrying it. That makes it a private matter.

How do you reconcile public policy when society is divided between those two world views? Obviously, it happens because we can see that democratic countries, like those in Europe, arrive at legislative solutions—and as it happens, ones not so far off from the polling in the U.S. I mentioned.

Here’s the rub. The overall national opinion in America is not uniform in every geographical sector. Some states already have very liberal abortion laws on the books, while others have laws (old and new) that ban the procedure. (Some of the so-called trigger laws may possibly be revised since Roe’s revocation is now a reality and not merely theoretical.) So, is that the solution? A patchwork of abortion policies decided (ultimately) by the voters in each state? That may satisfy people who look at the issue with a certain legal detachment, but it does not make people happy who have strong beliefs in the human values mentioned above. Living in a state with an abortion policy you agree with is small consolation when people just across the state line have the opposite situation.

To a certain extent, the same is true about how people feel when talking about national borders—but there may be more detachment in that case. I don’t think, for example, Germans fret about the lack of abortion rights in Poland in quite the same way that Washingtonians think about the situation in Idaho. Washington and Idaho, after all, are part of the same country.

Or are they? I mean, in a cohesive, social sense? That brings me back to my original question. Is the U.S. too big to contain its diversity of world views and human values? It all comes down to how strongly people are tied to certain beliefs and how motivated they are to defend them—or impose them on others.

Declining Post-sectarianism

President Higgins Formally Asks DUP Are They For F***ing Real
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper web site Waterford Whispers News, September 16

Many of us worry about what looks like increasing rates of sectarianism or divisiveness or polarization or whatever you want to call it. It seems like every issue or challenge that arises—the pandemic, extreme weather events, elections—immediately requires people to go to separate corners and politicize the atmosphere.

Is it ironic or inevitable that the division appears to get worse when things are actually going relatively well. To be sure, there are plenty of things to worry about, but many of the things people are anxious about—climate change, economic collapse, failure of democracy—tend to be looming things which, in some cases at least, may not even happen. Many are concerned about racial and economic inequality, but these problems are by no means new and, when viewed from a long historical perspective, actually seem to be on a trajectory, even if much too slow for those concerned, for getting better.

What worries me, among other things, is the polarization. It seems to be a phenomenon that waxes and wanes over history. Paradoxically, major wars—or more specifically, their aftermaths—appear to foster unity. Long-lasting, prosperous peacetime seems to give people time and space to dig into their differences.

A big part of the polarization problem is that it is human nature to readily perceive prejudices in others but not to recognize them in ourselves.

Ireland, a relatively small country, makes for an interesting laboratory for the armchair amateur social scientist. A century ago the island lived through a violent rebellion and war for independence and then a bloody civil war. In the process, the island was partitioned and two communities settled into an uneasy co-existence. Much of the past century was marked by violence from paramilitary groups and from the British military. Thankfully, since1998 there has been a peace agreement. Violence has not been completely eliminated, but it has been vastly reduced. Free trade and travel within the European Union, if not exactly equivalent to reunification, fostered a sense of unity on the island. That progress has been challenged in recent years by a narrow majority of United Kingdom voters deciding to leave the European Union, taking Northern Ireland with it.

Tensions have risen over issues of trade between and among Northern Ireland, the Irish republic and Great Britain—as well as the prospect of the return of some form of border controls. All this has been going on against a backdrop of centenaries for the events that resulted in independence for 26 of 32 Irish counties and the island’s partition.

At the birth of the current century, there was much salutary rhetoric over respecting and celebrating the diverse communities on the island. With the advent of Brexit, however, there has been at least a partial return to the old recriminations back and forth between unionists/Protestants on one side and nationalists/Catholics on the other. To be clear, those labels are generalizations and simplifications. The sectarian division is more accurately described as being between those who bear residual resentment toward the old colonizers and those who identify with the old colonizers. In other words, this is people harking back to their tribal roots and narratives.

The latest flashpoint in the tribal divisions is an inter-denominational service scheduled two weeks from now in the Church of Ireland cathedral in Armagh. Described by the organizers as a “service of reflection and hope,” its purpose is to commemorate the island’s partition on its centenary and, thus, the formation of Northern Ireland. Among the various dignitaries invited were Queen Elizabeth and Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins. The latter has politely but firmly—and in the face of some criticism, defiantly—declined.

Usually, it is the unionist politicians who come off looking like intransigent dinosaurs, clinging to their fundamentalist religion and traditions in the face of a changing world. This perception really doesn’t do justice to how far the late firebrand Ian Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party came to make peace with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the insurrectionist Provisional Irish Republican Army.

President Higgins’s decision to rebuff the invitation has been supported by a large majority in the republic. There is no way the president should have to “celebrate” the partition of his country, say his defenders—despite the fact event organizers have been clear it’s not a celebration. Unfortunately, the same logic could be used to justify all manner of intransigence on both sides of the sectarian divide. If both sides had stubbornly and consistently clung to such logic, there would have been no Good Friday Agreement ending the North’s Troubles.

The fact that the president’s position looks perfectly justified and reasonable to most of the republic’s citizens is a useful illustration of how much easier it is to recognize prejudice in others than in oneself.

Broadcasters in a State

RTÉ Documentary Makes Public Really Sad About Homelessness For A Whole Hour
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper website Waterford Whispers News, January 19

In my previous post I vented my frustration with the increasingly polarized and fragmented media landscape when it comes to broadcast journalism. I was speaking specifically about the United States, but what about other countries? I attributed the U.S.’s partisan environment to the sheer size of the country combined with technology that rewards narrowcasting. Surely, those would not be such prominent factors in other countries?

What is distinctive about the States as a country, besides its size, is that it has no dominant national broadcaster. That’s an institution pretty much ubiquitous throughout the rest of the world. Canada has the CBC, the United Kingdom has the BBC, France has France Télévisions, Russia has RT, and Ireland has RTÉ. Many countries also, unlike the U.S. and Canada, exact a household license fee for the purpose of subsidizing the national broadcaster. In Britain, for example, this means BBC viewers do not have to watch commercials—apart from the BBC’s own adverts touting BBC programs. Ireland has the worst of both worlds with viewers (and actually non-viewers as well) required to pay the annual license fee but still having to sit through commercial advertisements. Despite its hybrid viewer/corporate revenue stream, RTÉ has long been unable to balance a budget, although it has just been announced that it finally does have a surplus—thanks to the fact that for the past year people were literally forced to stay at home with little else to do but watch telly.

Technically, the U.S. does have a national broadcaster through the taxpayer-funded non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting which supports the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) networks, but these do not have anywhere near the dominance in America that other countries’ public broadcasters have. Also, because PBS’s and NPR’s taxpayer funding meets only a small part of their budgets, they rely largely on voluntary viewer contributions and corporate underwriting. In fact, one could make the argument that, due to their heavy reliance on corporate underwriting, PBS and NPR actually constitute one more facet of the U.S. corporate media landscape, albeit one with a very specific educated and affluent viewer demographic.

Shouldn’t the national broadcaster be the answer to polarized political reporting? Shouldn’t a public or semi-public entity with a mandate to serve the entire nation and, ideally, independent or semi-independent from corporate money be an antidote to all the partisan stuff? Maybe in theory, but not in my experience.

This is where I again get to mention my Master of Arts degree in journalism from Ohio State University. I did my studies in that fine institution back when the idea of a journalism school in college, particularly at the graduate level, was a new one. Most of my teachers had gotten their professorships bestowed on them honorarily in recognition of many years of working in the profession rather than through any academic qualifications. They were mostly well up in years because the teaching gig was basically their semi-retirement. These were old-school guys—and yes, they were mostly, if not exclusively, male—who experienced journalism as a blue-collar profession, pounding city streets and banging on manual typewriters, and who at the end of a workday unwound in smoky bars. They had a hard-nosed, practical and yet refreshingly idealistic idea of what journalism was. You were supposed to keep digging until you got the story, and you never took sides. In writing a story, you assumed nothing and took no one’s word at face value. Skepticism was the watchword.

If your mother says she loves you, went the rule, check it out!

I would love to find my old professors now—if any of them have lungs and livers that have survived this long—to find out what they think of the current state of journalism. I think I kind of know. They were basically newspaper guys, and even way back in the 1970s they looked down their noses at television. Of course, the internet was not even a thing yet. One principle they were clear on was that the government should have no role in the news business except as something to be covered aggressively. In many countries, one needs a license or an institutional qualification to practice journalism. In the U.S., by contrast, the First Amendment has always meant that every citizen is born a journalist. The government cannot pick and choose who is qualified to do the job.

My old professors’ main concern about state media in general was that it could not be objective when covering politicians who approved their budget and paid their salaries. Ironically, after a couple of decades of getting my television and radio news from state broadcasters, I find that the problem is nearly the opposite. Safeguards are in place in countries like the UK and Ireland to insulate state news organizations from government pressure. Significant public funding also tends to insulate them from advertiser pressure. That sounds like a good thing—until you cop on to the fact political and corporate pressure are often actually extensions of general public sentiment.

In practice, I find, state news organizations tend to become detached from the general public they are meant to be serving, not unlike the way political reporting at student-run college radio stations often goes off in its own idealistic direction. On top of that, state broadcasters are de facto gatekeepers of information in the way that the three big corporate network news organizations in the U.S. once styled themselves. In RTÉ’s world, if it determines something is not worthy or salutary for public consumption, it simply does not get reported. Yes, there is a much smaller commercial rival TV broadcaster here as well as several newspapers, but by practical necessity most people have to rely on RTÉ for their daily news.

Those who don’t find the state broadcaster reflecting their own personal reality inevitably look for alternative sources of information. Traditionally, stories have gotten passed around informally by word of mouth. Of course, these days finding alternative news sources is easier than it’s ever been, and there are no geographical limits.

Is there anything corporate broadcasters (in the U.S.) or state broadcasters (elsewhere) could do to better meet the needs of news consumers?

The reality may be that there is no perfect model for broadcast journalism and that the current state of information churn is the best we can hope for.

On one hand, after years of listening to measured, modulated and controlled news broadcasts from state broadcasters, the blaring and breathless style of U.S. cable news operations—with their all-too-frequent commercial interruptions—grates.

On the other hand, I often find myself wishing I could switch to a different Irish channel (sorry, Virgin Media, you’re not it) for a contrasting perspective or just to fill in the information gaps.

Hand of God

Note: This particular entry is being cross-posted on both my book and expat blogs.

Because of my personality type, I find myself compulsively scanning newspaper headlines from several different countries on a daily basis. Usually, there is a logical degree of variation, from country to country, as to what lands on the front pages. Sometimes, though, the same news dominates the front page everywhere. Normally, that tends to happen only there has been a major disaster of some kind or a particularly dramatic development in the United States. Sometimes it is the death of someone famous.

Rarely have I seen such uniformity in top headlines as I have seen today on the covers of papers in Ireland, the UK, the rest of Europe, Chile, Peru, the rest of Latin America and even the US. It is a testimony to the unifying power of the sport of soccer that the top story everywhere was the sudden death of Argentine soccer god Diego Maradona of an apparent heart attack at the age of 60.

I say “even the US” because soccer does not have quite the hold in my own country as it does in the rest of the world. This is despite the fact that many of us would have played the sport in our youth and would be quite familiar with the rules. Certain countries, i.e. the ones that use the word “soccer” (the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland), have their own homegrown sports they call “football.” Most everywhere else, though, that word and its variants (fútbol, le foot, fußball) refer to what is universally called “the beautiful game.” While Maradona’s demise was widely reported in the US, he did not make the front pages of, for example, The Bakersfield Californian or The Seattle Times. He did make the front page of The New York Times, though well below the fold. He likely would have made the front page of The Wall Street Journal, but that paper does not publish on Thanksgiving. (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, my fellow Americans.)

An impressive number of papers made a playful reference to God’s hands in their headlines, as exemplified by the UK’s Daily Express: “RIP: The eternal, flawed genius… now safe in the hands of God.” These are all not-so-subtle references to a famous/notorious goal he scored in Mexico City on June 22, 1986. It was in a quarter-finals match between Argentina and England. The goal should not have counted because Maradona used his hand. In fact, he should have received a yellow card for the infraction. Amazingly, no referee had a clear view, so the goal was allowed. Combined with a subsequent Maradona goal, it meant a 2-1 victory for the Argentines.

Afterwards, Maradona proclaimed that his first goal of the match had come thanks to “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” The goal was henceforth known as the “Hand of God” goal. The second one became known as the “Goal of the Century.”

In Asif Kapadia’s documentary Diego Maradona, released last year, the soccer titan drew a link between that win over England and the Falklands War a few years earlier: “We, as Argentinians, didn’t know what the military was up to. They told us that we were winning the war. But in reality, England was winning 20‑0. It was tough. The hype made it seem like we were going to play out another war. I knew it was my hand. It wasn’t my plan but the action happened so fast that the linesman didn’t see me putting my hand in. The referee looked at me and he said: ‘Goal.’ It was a nice feeling like some sort of symbolic revenge against the English.”

Maradona’s passing comes at a time when his life and career and even the Falklands War are all fresh in my mind. That is because the la Guerra de las Malvinas, as the Argentines called that conflict, is a plot element in Searching for Cunégonde, and there is even a reference to the soccer player in the novel. In Chapter 14 our hero Dallas’s search for his long-missing friend Antonio leads him and his new British friend Donal to Mendoza, Argentina, and to a man named Alberto. To keep their quest from ending in failure, they need to gain the wary Alberto’s confidence. It appears that the pair have run out of luck until, by chance, Donal and Alberto discover a mutual bond over their passion for international football.

“There is a young Argentine player you need to watch out for,” says Alberto. “He is only twenty years old, but he is already better than George Best ever was. Listen to my words. Remember the name Maradona.”

Indeed, at that point Maradona had wrapped up five years playing for a club called Argentinos Juniors and around that time signed a contract worth US$4 million with Boca Juniors. At not quite 16 years old, he had become the youngest player ever in the history of the Primera División. He had scored 115 goals in 167 appearances. Early on he was dubbed el Pibe de Oro (the golden kid). So Alberto did not need to be a gifted prophet to see Maradona’s bright future all the way back in 1981. What he probably did not foresee was the star’s later life beset by addictions and health problems.

Sadly, I will now never get the chance—as if I was ever likely to—to ask the great man if he was at all flattered to be featured in my novel. I suppose there is still hope, though, to someday ask actor Rob Lowe what he thought of his brief mention.

In the end Dallas and Donal get the information seek from Alberto, so at least that part of their quest is successful. As Dallas narrates, “I continued thanking him as he walked us back to the street. Locking the gate after us, he said to Donal, ‘Remember my words, Gringo! Watch out for Maradona!’ ”

Prescient words indeed.

Expert Advice

“Sorry, Only Seeing This Now…” Government Finally Text NPHET Back After Recommending Level 5 Restrictions 2 Weeks Ago
 —Headline on the Irish satirical newspaper web site Waterford Whispers, October 19

If you watched the original Star Trek series when you were a kid, as I did, then you may have wondered, as I did, why Mr. Spock was not the ship’s captain instead of James T. Kirk.

Spock was invariably cool, calm and in total control of his emotions. He was a brilliant scientist—in fact he was the Enterprise’s science officer—and a rigorous practitioner of logic. While Kirk was frequently distracted by some bit of intergalactic skirt or otherwise being led by his emotions, Spock was completely dedicated to his work and mission. Whenever Kirk had to absent himself and would tell Spock to “take the com,” things always seemed to run much more efficiently, and the leadership decisions were more consistent and clear.

There is an obvious reason why Kirk was the captain and not Spock. It made for better stories. Efficiently run organizations are not inherently watchable from an entertainment point of view. The show’s writers did actually come up with a justification for the Enterprise’s command structure. In the sixteenth episode of the first season (“The Galileo Seven”), Mr. Spock is in a position of command on an away mission. After an emergency landing on the planet Taurus II, Spock’s manner annoys and frustrates his subordinates no end. A desperate attempt is made to escape the planet, but the shuttle cannot escape the planet’s gravity. In an apparent act of desperation, Spock dumps the craft’s precious remaining fuel and ignites it. This seems pointless and foolhardy, but the flare is spotted by the Enterprise crew, which is then able to save the shuttle passengers by transporter beam in the few remaining seconds.

Kirk—and perhaps the writers—think Spock has learned a lesson in leadership because he acted emotionally rather than logically, but wasn’t Spock’s desperate act actually logical? After all, it succeeded. In a last-ditch situation, trying anything, even with near-zero probability of success, is surely more logical than doing nothing. Still, Kirk’s larger point stands. Leadership is more than just technical expertise.

In times when people get frustrated with their political leaders, you often hear voices arguing that governmental decisions should be made by technocrats or “experts” rather than individuals whose strongest ability is climbing to the top of the political ladder. You particularly hear this nowadays as countries struggle with a long-term emergency medical situation. President Trump has been roundly criticized for being dismissive of Anthony Fauci, a lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and other medical advisers. Joe Biden, who looks likely to replace Trump in January, says repeatedly that, as president, he would “follow medical experts’ advice.”

For months Irish politicians smugly compared themselves to Trump and congratulated themselves on following the experts. The self-congratulation stopped abruptly four Sundays ago when the press learned that the country’s chief medical officer, on behalf of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), had written the government advising that the Republic of Ireland move to Level 5, i.e. the most restrictive set of measures currently available. The following evening, in a television interview, Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Leo Varadkar defended the government’s decision to go to a lower-than-recommended level of restrictions, saying the medical advice had come “out of the blue” and was “not thought through.” Sixteen days later, under continuing media criticism and deteriorating case numbers, the government went to Level 5.

In his original defense of the government’s hesitation to tighten restrictions, Varadkar pointed out that the government must take into account all manner of economic and social repercussions, while the medical experts’ brief is limited to the spread of the virus. They have the luxury, if you want to call it that, to strive for minimal risk in their recommendations. The government faces serious risk no matter what it decides. The government’s defenders declared that, while NPHET should be heeded, it is not the government.

One of the strongest arguments I have read for not turning experts into autocrats comes not from some right-wing sheet but from an article two years ago in the left-of-center Guardian. In the piece David Runciman of Cambridge University argued against “epistocracy: the rule of the knowers.” It is a detailed and thoughtful article and well worth reading. Here is the nub of his argument:

Epistocracy is flawed because of the second part of the word rather than the first—this is about power (kratos) as much as it is about knowledge (episteme). Fixing power to knowledge risks creating a monster that can’t be deflected from its course, even when it goes wrong—which it will, since no one and nothing is infallible. Not knowing the right answer is a great defence against people who believe that their knowledge makes them superior.

The nature of science is exemplified by experimentation, debate, revision and skepticism. Ironically, many people, usually not scientists themselves, invoke Science as some immutable ultimate authority, not unlike the way religious fundamentalists would try to shut down arguments by invoking the Old Testament.

Such people would have you believe that there is near-unanimity among scientists on a range of critical issues. Worse, they seem at times to believe the anointed experts are infallible. Certainly, following the prevailing scientific opinion in a crisis is the smart thing to do, but it should never be treated uncritically as received truth. Unanimity of opinion is the virtual antithesis of science. You only have to read the October 4 Great Barrington Declaration by professors from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford or a recent letter to the Irish government signed by fifteen doctors, including those on the frontlines, to realize that there is a healthy debate going on about the best way to deal with pandemic.

By all means, you want Mr. Spock on the ship’s deck for his technical expertise and his advice. The captain, though, will want to hear from him and other crew members and then draw upon his or her own judgment before heading out into the great unknown.

Expat Literary Hero

 They began to raise their voices.
 «Now we have a Fascist dictatorship!»
 «Instead of a Communist one!»
 People sitting near us looked uncomfortable. As for me, I was becoming, strangely and unexpectedly, aroused.
  —Excerpt from Chapter 11 of Searching for Cunégonde

There is something empowering about writing fiction. When you pen a novel, you experience the illusion of being God. You create people. You make them do what you want. You have total control of their fates. You can bestow them with good fortune or you can punish them with senseless tragedy. Their destinies are pretty much literally in your hands.

In practice, it doesn’t really feel that way. Characters—even ones you create yourself—have a way of taking on lives of their own. I think most authors have the strange experience of finding they are channeling their characters rather than controlling them. Your own characters sometimes do things you did not plan or want. Events sometimes take a turn you didn’t see coming when you started out.

These are interesting things to ponder but are probably best left for my book blog where I announced this week the publication of my fifth novel Searching for Cunégonde. More pertinent to this space is the fact that, when one writes a story set in a particular time and place, one is generally constrained by real-world events and situations.

The new book continues the adventures of Dallas Green, the protagonist of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear. More pertinent to this space is the background provided by the real world to his story. In all three books, he is a picaresque hero journeying through the strange world in which he finds himself. The first novel was set in 1971, the time of the Vietnam War, the military draft in the U.S., and political unrest in Central America. The second book took place in 1980, the year of a U.S. presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan’s election, the sixth Deauville American Film Festival, and a constitutional referendum in Chile.

The new tome splits its narrative mainly between two different time periods. One strand picks up directly after the end of Lautaro’s Spear in December 1980 and proceeds through the following year. These bits alternate with events in the year 1993. This larger scope allowed me to draw in all sorts of historical references. Dallas experiences several weeks of comfortable living under the Pinochet dictatorship as well as venturing into Argentina, also governed by a military junta. There is then a return to California which not only provides a contrast between South and North America but also an implicit comparison between the rural San Joaquin Valley and the suburbs of the Bay Area. Indeed there are a number of contrasts drawn in this story, for example two very different funerals in two very distinct cultures.

By the time this leg of Dallas’s journey ends, he has become all too acquainted with the violent latter days of Ireland’s Troubles. He has also become a nearly unwitting participant in the bad old days of the Cold War, and he even gets to witness the single most symbolic moment of the fall of Communism.

If I have made Dallas’s exploits sound as if they are all about politics, then I have misled you. In this book, as in the others, the heart of the story is really in the friendships. There is some romance as well, or at least as much romance as a neo-Lost-Generation baby-boomer can manage in a cynical world. He finds himself in bed with an interesting array of lovers and not-quite lovers.

At one point someone compares him to the hero of Voltaire’s Candide, thus tipping my hand. That is how I have always seen him—someone more or less politically innocent, wandering the world with wide eyes and bearing witness to the strangeness and wonder of the wider world.

Appropriately enough for this blog, in the course of this novel Dallas becomes an expat. I tried to capture at least a bit of the disorientation that comes with adjusting to a different culture and functioning in a different language. In the end, though, the goal was always to entertain. Mainly to entertain myself, but in the hope that others might be inadvertently entertained as well.

The paperback edition of Searching for Cunégonde is available from major online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The digital version is available from Amazon’s Kindle store, Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, Kobo, Google Play and Apple iBooks. For those links and other information, kindly consult my book blog.

Peacemaker

“He focused on unity and peace and giving that dignity to every person. We should never underestimate how difficult it was for John to cross the road and do what was intensely unpopular for the greater good.”
  —Father Paul Farren, in his homily at the funeral of John Hume, August 5

One major impact the pandemic has had on Irish society is the curtailment of large, public funerals. Along with weddings, christenings and First Holy Communions, the funeral is one of those rituals the define the Irish character and survives even in a time when regular Mass-going has dropped precipitously.

It is a sad irony that, among the many funerals held during this strangely becalmed period, was that of John Hume in early August. If his send-off in his native Derry had been commensurate with his contribution to life on this island, it would have been a massive affair. Instead, like the man himself it was restrained and dignified and somewhat overshadowed by large events. As it was, though, in the spite of the restrictions the attendance was impressive. Mourners included Northern Ireland’s deputy and first ministers, Ireland’s president, Taoiseach and foreign minister, and the UK’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Tributes were read out, including those from the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Bill Clinton, Boris Johnson and, inevitably, U2’s Bono.

Appropriately, in the evening on the day of his death, the Irish state broadcaster aired Maurice Fitzpatrick’s excellent documentary In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America. It was a fitting homage to the man, and I would heartily recommend anyone with an interest in Ireland’s history or current affairs to take any opportunity to see it. I was fortunate enough to attend the film’s world premiere at the 2017 Galway Film Fleadh and also attend a panel discussion including the filmmaker and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who was in office when the Good Friday peace agreement was signed.

Since Hume’s passing, I have done much pondering of what an extraordinary man he was and why we see so few like him in public life. I suppose there are moments when the times require a particular kind of person and they somehow find him or her. When things are going well, such people are ignored in favor of the ambitious and opportunistic.

You could say that Hume was just smarter than other politicians. His strategy led to a peace agreement for Northern Ireland because he saw that there was more chance of success if he got the United States’ leadership on board. Moreover, unlike many politicians, he recognized that there needed to be recognition of legitimate concerns of both sides in the dispute and that an agreement had to benefit both sides. You hear precious little talk like that these days among politicians in Belfast, Dublin, London or Washington.

All that, however, still isn’t the most extraordinary thing about Hume’s achievement. He undertook a course for finding peace in his country, knowing full well that it could doom his own political party and his own career. That is exactly what happened, but he did it anyway because he had his eye on the greater good. Once the peace was secured, unionists and nationalists—whether out of fear or out of a need for retrenchment—abandoned the dominant moderate parties (the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party) that had negotiated the peace and switched their votes to more extreme parties (the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin). Those two parties have governed Northern Ireland in partnership ever since, while the UUP and SDLP have become shadows of the former selves. The peace process also took a personal toll on Hume, as his health went into decline.

Does the rise of the DUP and Sinn Féin mean the peace accord wasn’t worth it? Hardly. There was not only a persistent drop in the province’s political violence, but we were treated to the spectacle an unexpectedly cordial friendship between bitter old enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. They became so comfortable with each other that wags dubbed them the “Chuckle Brothers.”

Things have been by no means smooth in Northern Ireland, and things look to get dicey with Brexit looming, but only very sick minds regret the end of the Troubles. That would not have been possible without John Hume and his willingness to put peace and cooperation above his own personal interests. It will not be lost on cynics, however, that the careers which flourished as a result of Hume’s efforts were those of Paisley, who had stirred the fires of sectarianism, and Adams, who had reportedly been an active participant in the violence of the Troubles.

When looking at my own country these days and the increasingly bitter estrangement between those on different political sides, I wonder if there is an American John Hume out there somewhere who would sacrifice his or her political career to bring the two sides together. Sometimes people surprise you, but right now I don’t see anybody on the political scene who isn’t in it for themselves or their own side.

Will things have to get even worse before the times finally produce someone of John Hume’s caliber?

Country Mice, City Mice

“Drink Driving, Grants for TD’s Constituency, Character References for Criminals: Fianna Fáil Are Back Baby!”
  —Headline on the satirical Irish newspaper website Waterford Whispers News, July 8

“A Cabinet Fit for Cromwell,” proclaimed a headline in the County Mayo-based Western People newspaper four weeks ago. That’s no small amount of pique or annoyance for a Connacht publication to express. To this day, one hears the name of England’s 17th-century military leader and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell invoked with a revulsion so enduring it feels as though the swath his army cut through Ireland occurred only a week ago.

What cabinet sparked such a visceral reaction in a regional newspaper? Was it a ministerial shuffle by Boris Johnson in the UK or perhaps some dodgy compromise in the Northern Ireland Assembly? No, it was directed at the Republic’s new government in Dublin.

How did this happen? To recap briefly, a general election was held on February 8. The vote was split roughly in quarters—one for left-wing/pro-unification party Sinn Féin and one each for traditional centrist parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The rest went to smaller parties and independents. After four-and-a-half months of posturing and negotiations, a government was formed on June 27. Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin heads the government until December 2022 after which Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar will replace him as Taoiseach. The two also alternate as each other’s Tánaiste (deputy prime minister). The third member of the coalition is the Green Party, giving the government the solid bloc of votes needed for a stable majority.

How stable is it, though? No one seems particularly thrilled by this government. Perhaps die-hard Fianna Fáil partisans are, but their numbers shrank drastically after the 2011 election debacle when the party was punished roundly for its role in the country’s financial crash. Notably unhappy is the half of the electorate that voted for Sinn Féin, independents and other left-wing parties and who felt there had been a pretty clear mandate for change. Quite a few Green Party members also seemed unhappy, although in the end members did ratify the party’s participation in the government in surprisingly large numbers.

While the traditional way of looking at the country’s political division would be in terms of the left/right split, it might be clearer to see it as an urban/rural split. The Western People headline above was in reaction to the fact that, for the first time in yonks, the government’s voting cabinet included no TD (member of parliament) from west of the Shannon River. Westerners were particularly sensitive this time around because the government’s aggressive program for reducing Ireland’s carbon footprint, which was pushed hard by the Greens and, more importantly, mandated by the European Union. As mentioned here last time, as a nation less industrialized than other European ones, Ireland can only achieve this through sacrifices from vehicle owners and farmers. TDs in the Dublin area represent mostly people who never go near a farm and who have access to public transportation, while the West will be asked to undergo a radical change to its traditions and lifestyle.

The omission of a western cabinet minister did soon get rectified in classically Irish fashion. In what seemed like a political hit job, a story came out about the new agricultural minister having been caught for drink driving a few years ago at a road checkpoint after an All-Ireland football match. It further emerged that he had been driving on a learner’s permit up until the age of 47. That fellow (brother of the last previous Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, as it happens) was soon pushed out, freeing up a cabinet seat for a TD from County Mayo. This hasn’t placated the wary westerners much, and now it’s the Midlands complaining they no longer have a minister.

Rural/urban divides are common enough in world politics, and no more so in the United States. Non-urban voters in the U.S. have a bit more of an advantage than in most countries, though. Senate voting and the Electoral College give extra weight to states at the expense of the general population. It was a carefully crafted compromise in the Constitution to convince less populated states to stay in the Union and assure them that their interests would not be overridden by people in dense population centers. That old tension has not gone away. After all, that 18th-century compromise made possible the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The looming question in both the U.S. and Ireland is what happens if and when people rural dwellers begin to feel that not only are their interests overridden but they themselves are under attack? We can only hope the various political systems will be up to the challenge.

Jigsaw Puzzle

“Nation Gives It a Week Before Fianna Fáil & Fine Gael at Each Other’s Throats”
  —Headline on the satirical Irish newspaper website Waterford Whispers News, June 17

Surely, you might be thinking, Ireland must have a government by now. Wasn’t the election way back in February? The current situation here is a good example of the limits of parliamentary government in a politically divided society.

Three of the four largest parties (in terms of seats won) have indeed negotiated a coalition agreement. This is historic for a couple of reasons. For one, it marks the first time that the dominant traditional parties (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) have agreed to formally govern together. In Irish terms, this is comparable to the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. forming a coalition in, say, the early 1960s (i.e. when the two parties were more heterogenous than they are today) in response to a fast-rising third party. Remember, these Irish parties are remnants of factions that fought a bloody civil war a mere century ago. Some party old-timers are reacting like hell has frozen over.

The other historic thing about it is that the third partner is the Green Party. Yes, the Greens have been in government before, but they were not in a position to seriously affect government policy the way they are now. This time they are playing hardball. They know there will not be a stable government without them, and they have pressed that advantage for all it’s worth. In addition to addressing various social issues, increasing funding for cycling and public transportation infrastructure and raising the carbon tax, it commits the government to cutting the nation’s carbon emissions 7 percent per year.

That last one will prove interesting. Lightly industrialized compared to other European countries, the bulk of Ireland’s emissions (38 percent) come from homes and cars. Another big chunk (33 percent) comes from agriculture, mostly methane from livestock. (Yes, cow farts.) To reduce emissions by that target is going to involve some pretty major changes to both modern and traditional ways of life here. The already-existing urban/rural divide could well become fraught.

Leaders of the two big parties presumably can deliver their members’ support, but the Greens are divided, and the entire membership must vote on the agreement. A lot of the most idealistic members think the deal does not go nearly far enough. Some notable party members have publicly come out against it.

If the deal falls apart, then what? In that case, a new election looks unavoidable. How is that likely to turn out?

Sinn Féin, which was locked out of coalition talks, won the most seats in the February election and were on a definite upswing in the weeks after. Will that bear out in a new poll, thereby putting Ireland on a clearly leftward path? Or will Fine Gael (on the wane leading up to the last election) bounce back because of its caretaker government role in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic?

Even if the coalition works out, things will not be easy. As Independent TD John Halligan put it, “Fianna Fáil traditionally can’t stand Fine Gael. Fine Gael traditionally can’t stand Fianna Fáil and both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael can’t stand the Greens so you’re going to have some mismatch of a government put together.”

If it does fall apart, the big loser will be Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, who stands to be the next taoiseach (prime minister) in a rotating arrangement with Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar. He has long aspired to be the first taoiseach from Cork since Jack Lynch left office in 1979.

As a headline in The Irish Times had it over the weekend, “Micheál Martin, the ‘next taoiseach’ since 1998.”

Virtual Government

“Teacher Can’t Wait To Use ‘Calculated Grades’ To F*** Over Prick Student He Hates”
  —Headline (slightly edited) on the Irish satirical newspaper website Waterford Whispers, May 8

Here are a couple of questions that come to mind as the pandemic persists. Is Ireland turning into Singapore? Are governments even necessary?

The first question is prompted by the inevitable police-state-style trappings that accompany emergency situations like quarantines and lockdowns. Of course, in typical Irish fashion, when Taoiseach Leo Varadkar addressed the country via television on March 24, he described a lockdown while at the same time saying he preferred not to use the word lockdown. In other words, we aren’t forcing you to stay home; it’s just a helpful suggestion. With time, though, the shutdown has become more stringently enforced. TV news footage on a bank holiday weekend showed traffic jams on major roads as officers of the Garda Síochána stopped cars at checkpoints to decide on a case-by-case basis whether each car’s travel was essential. Reasonable people certainly support law enforcement breaking up large gatherings and people crowding into public spaces, but anecdotal word-of-mouth accounts have also described gardaí stopping people walking alone on beaches and in uncrowded parks and inspecting people’s groceries to determine if their shopping was essential.

There may be a law-and-order silver lining to all this. Newspapers recount incidences of gardaí catching smugglers of drugs and illegal weapons because of the lockdown-enforcing checkpoints. Another silver lining may be—depending on your point of view—the cancellation of the Leaving Certification, the battery of state exams that graduating secondary school students endure for the sake of college placement. Instead students will be awarded “predictive” points based on past performance and evaluations by their teachers and principals. One hopes this system will work better than predictive text when typing on one’s mobile phone.

Of course, it is only reasonable to expect to have your liberty and economic well-being curtailed in a life-or-death emergency. Previous civilian generations have sacrificed much more in wartime and in the wake of natural disasters. What makes it a bit unreal in the current situation, though, is that the emergency has a strangely virtual quality to it. We mainly know how bad things are because of statistics flashed on a screen or printed in a newspaper. In the visible world around us, nothing seems to have changed except for the way everyone is behaving.

Adding to the Singapore effect here is the fact that the dominant source of news is the state broadcaster. RTÉ is in the tricky dual role of official dispenser of government information and journalistic enterprise. Hosts of all public affairs programs on the TV and radio are clearly expected to be generally supportive of the government’s measures and by extension the medical opinions underlying them. After a while—especially to someone used to the clashing ideological news sources in the US media landscape—it starts to feel a bit Big-Brother-ish.

A further complication is that there is currently no government here. By an accident of timing, the pandemic happened at the same moment as an inconclusive general election. Given the results, forming a new government was always going to be a challenge. Because of the emergency, negotiations are competing with even more serious distractions than normal. So Varadkar continues as a caretaker head of government along with his outgoing ministers, some of whom actually lost their seats in the election. In a Catch-22-like situation, the caretaker government cannot pass legislation because that requires a full Senate, and there won’t be a full Senate until there is a new Taoiseach because only the new Taoiseach can complete the Senate with his own appointments, and there won’t be a new Taoiseach until a new government is formed. I wonder if all those politicians who once talked about reforming or abolishing the Senate wish they had actually done something about it when they had they chance.

As of this writing, the two major parties which have always run the country are in what seem to be final negotiations with the Green Party, which appears riven by the prospect of another go as a minority coalition partner. Not only does a sizeable portion of the Greens look to be alienated by the likely result, so will be a big chunk of voters who gave the major-change party Sinn Féin a plurality of the popular vote.

Reassuringly, the lack of a government has not stopped the caretaker ministers and professional civil service from dealing with the pandemic. Whatever they need to do, they just do—whether by written orders or edict or fiat or whatever. They are also spending (actually, borrowing) a ton of money to get through the crisis. You can’t really blame them. After all, what other choice do they realistically have?

It is, however, what prompts the question I asked above. Are elected governments even necessary?

My concern is for when Sinn Féin eventually finds itself in the position of being able to answer that question.

Life in Lockdown

“As well-armed as the Parliamentary forces were, their deadliest weapon may have been the one they brought inadvertently. People in the town were now dying of a plague that had traveled with the English. Memories were all too fresh of the 1649 plague that had killed well over 3,000.”
   —Excerpt from the 2019 novel The Curse of Septimus Bridge

The above quote is a handy reminder that 1) plagues, endemics and pandemics have always been with us and 2) I actually wrote a novel called The Curse of Septimus Bridge. (For more information on that, as well as an update on my upcoming novel, see my book blog.)

History tells us that armies, explorers, conquistadores, holidaymakers and business travelers have, at various points in time, have helped spread virulent diseases from one territory to another. What is amazing is that, in this age of globalism and cheap-and-easy international travel, such outbreaks do not happen more often. Instead we appear to be going through a once-in-a-century phenomenon with the current crisis evoking mostly recollections of the 1918-1920 so-called Spanish flu pandemic.

That flu is estimated to have infected a third of the world’s population and killed, in the most liberal guesses, as many as 100 million. Then the world was much more defenseless than now. The ventilator would not be invented until several years later, and flu vaccines were decades away.

As the experts remind us, Covid-18 is not an influenza strain and so does not behave like one. That is what makes it scary. We are only learning as time goes on exactly how it behaves and just how dangerous it truly is.

There are signs of optimism if you want to look for them. For those of us in the majority who (as far as we know anyway) have not experienced it, the danger is more theoretical than real. For those who have had a mild or even asymptomatic case, the main concern is for others rather than for oneself. Perhaps the most optimistic sign is that many people’s nerves have relaxed enough that they have already moved past the old-wartime-style-let’s-all-pull-together mentality right to using the crisis as one more political football. I don’t spend much time listening to the White House daily briefings, but based on what I have heard they seem to contain a lot of useful and/or interesting information from government and health officials. When it comes to cable news, the president and his twitter account, though, he and the press corps seem more than content to just carry on the same noisy and distracting game in which they have engaged since the 2016 election.

Here in Ireland the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit still mostly prevails. A lot of that has to do with the fact that news coverage here is led by a dominant state broadcaster that has little space for unsanctioned views or contrarian attitudes at a time like this. There is much collective self-back-patting at the Irish response, frequently drawing meaningless, self-flattering comparisons to other (much larger) countries, particular the UK and the US.

Having said that, there is a growing criticism, or at least collective regret, that the authorities were blindsided by the number of fatalities in nursing homes. With the benefit of hindsight it now seems clear that, while citizens in general were told to hunker down in their homes, not enough attention was given to the vulnerable elder population residing in clusters. This is probably because the planners were watching what was going on hotspots like China and Italy where living and family arrangements are more traditional than here. Ireland has become more like America in that the old folks are more likely to be sent off to a home.

For the average news consumer it is difficult to gauge exactly how bad things are in general. On one hand we see disturbing images of pine coffins stacked on top of each other in a trench on New York’s Hart Island as well as similar photos from Spain and Italy. On the other hand, there is the article in today’s Wall Street Journal about results of hundreds of blood tests taken in Los Angeles. Echoing similar stories from Europe, the emerging picture is that a lot more people than expected have antibodies for Covid-19, suggesting the rate of serious illness and fatalities among those exposed is actually quite a bit lower than previously thought.

I guess that’s a perverse kind of optimism. Another example is the fact that some people are emboldened to go out—against health expert advice—and protest restrictions imposed by authorities. People have marched or found other ways of protesting in such far-flung places as Michigan, Washington, Texas, France, Germany, India and Chile. Others have more cautiously done their protesting online. These are clearly signs of pent-up frustration at the personal and economic restrictions as well as local-issue-fueled discontent. The protestors are willing to test the assertion they risk spreading the disease more widely. In the process, they have become a political litmus test in the debate between those who want everyone to heed government/expert advice/diktats and those who subscribe to the spirit, which was big in the 1960s, of “question authority.”

The other night, protesting fishermen in Dingle, County Kerry, prevented the docking of Spanish-owned trawler for fear of introducing more virus cases. Were they perhaps thinking back a whole century to the Spanish flu?

Government Self-isolation

“Ireland Officially Changes Covid-19 Status From ‘Be Grand’ To ‘Alright, Fair Enough’ ”
 —Headline on the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News on Thursday

Remember a while back when I gloated that countries that have the parliamentary system, like Ireland, get their campaigns and elections over with quickly and do not drag their citizens through endless months and years of electioneering? Well, the flip side of that is that, under the parliamentary system, once the election is over, sometimes you can be waiting weeks or months for a government to be formed.

An extreme example of this was the Belgian election of 2010. Prime Minister Yves Leterme resigned on April 26 of that year, and the election was held on June 13. It took until November of 2011 for a government to be formed. Leterme wound up serving as a caretaker head of government for 589 days.

The root causes of the deadlock lay in the country’s division between the Flemish and the Walloons, Belgian peoples who not only have different cultures but who literally speak different languages. Things got so bad that, at one point, separatist Walloons had talks with the president of France and the French Socialist Party about becoming a new region of France.

So how are things going in Ireland, which had its election on February 8? More than a month later there is still no government. Is there any danger Dublin will break Brussels’ record for government-forming negotiations? Not likely, given the seriousness of Brexit and, more immediately, the coronavirus emergency. The latter particularly seems to leave no room for more of the game-playing that the various parties were happy to indulge in at first. Anything that cancels everything from St. Patrick’s Day to GAA matches to Mass is pretty serious business.

Here’s my own assessment of the government situation, for what it’s worth (probably not much). Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael each won roughly a quarter of the seats in Dáil Éireann. The remainder went to various smaller parties and independents. How do you fit that jigsaw puzzle together? Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are perfectly compatible ideologically but hate the idea of a “grand coalition” between them for historical reasons and the likely real perception that such a deal would only shrink their support further, helping the left in the long run. Fine Gael in particular appears anxious to go into opposition, calculating that is in its best long-term interest.

The Green Party with its 12 seats is in the kingmaker seat, as they are the only easy completing piece to a combination of any two of the larger parties. The Greens, however, were badly burned the last time they were a junior coalition partner, so they are holding firm on either getting to call the shots or opting for a national unity government. Sinn Féin, which has never been in government in the republic, seems anxious to get in, but the other large parties have varying levels of mistrust.

The national unity idea (a government of all elected TDs) has gained force with the intensifying Covid-19 pressure. However good it may sound in a Kumbaya sort of way, though, it would be awfully unwieldy in practice.

The likely outcome, as least as it appears as of this writing, is a FF/FG/Greens arrangement, but who would lead it? Outgoing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar only seems interested if there is a rotating Taoiseach arrangement. Another idea that has been floated is to make the leader of the smallest coalition partner (the Greens’ Eamon Ryan) the head of government. This might assuage left-leaning voters, who are certain to feel bitterly cheated by a FF/FG government. Those parties are all too aware that the only reasons that Sinn Féin does not have an outright plurality of seats is because 1) FF got a freebie because one of their members happened to be the Ceann Comhairle (lower house speaker) and so retained his seat automatically and 2) Sinn Féin did not put forward more candidates who, it is now clear, would have been elected. To add even more pressure, the first opinion poll after the election showed a huge jump in support for Sinn Féin, meaning that a new election might well turn out even worse for the other two main parties, resulting in a Sinn Féin-led government.

It is worth noting that the concerns about Sinn Féin are not without merit. The party seems to have an awful lot of money on hand and, even taking into account a multi-million-pound bequeathal in a quirky, old, radical Englishman’s will last year, the source of its funding is by no means entirely clear. Furthermore, the highest levels of the party’s decision-making are frustratingly opaque, which does nothing to dispel concerns that the old IRA Army Council, or some variation of it, is still calling the shots.

It is still an open question how the next Irish government will be formed. One hopes it will not take as long as Belgium a decade ago. An interesting question is whether, as in the Belgian case, an extended deadlock will spur some—even more than already—toward thoughts of realigning national borders.

Populism’s Popularity

“Irish Parties Put Their Car Keys in a Bowl as Coalition Talks Begin”
 —Headline on the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News on Monday

What exactly is a populist? It’s a word that you hear a lot, and perhaps you even use it yourself. Do we all understand and mean the same thing when it is used?

For a while now my own handy definition of populist has been a politician who is very popular but whom I personally do not like. That is because the word usually seems to be used in negative connotation, usually in relation to President Trump.

I have now gone to the trouble of looking up the dictionary meaning, and this is what at least one online dictionary says: “A person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is even simpler, not mentioning elites: “A person who seeks to represent or appeal to the interests of ordinary people.” That suggests that, if you consider the word populist some kind of epithet, then it must be because you have little regard for the concerns of “ordinary people.”

In a democracy isn’t appealing to most people, presumably including ordinary people, the whole point of the exercise? Yet in many uses of the word populist I get a sense that the word’s target is branded as manipulating or deceiving simple-minded folks. I suppose it comes down to one’s confidence in the judgment of the electorate as a whole.

The dictionary definition does not ascribe any particular ideology to populism, so pretty much any politician—left, right or center—can be one, as long as his or her rhetoric is aimed squarely at ordinary folks. President Trump certainly qualifies, but you would have to say that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do as well. Their clear message is that ordinary people are being exploited by the rich and powerful. In Ireland I think you could say that, similarly, Mary Lou McDonald, head of the Sinn Féin party, qualifies as a populist. She claims to speak on behalf of ordinary people in rejecting policies of the two parties that have governed the Irish republic since its founding.

Since very few politicians would claim not to represent the interests of ordinary people, does the term populist have any meaning at all—other than to to frighten the supporters of longtime, well-established politicians or parties?

If we think of populism as simply a rejection of politics as usual, then there is certainly a lot of it around.

Having now won a popular plurality in the first two Democratic primary contests, Sanders is certainly worrying the “elites” in his party. Is it more important that he came in first in New Hampshire, though, or that candidates more “moderate” than he and Elizabeth Warren (Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden) collectively took more than half the vote? That depends on whether Democratic voters are mostly making their choices by looking at the candidates through a left/moderate prism or through an electable/non-electable lens. In voters’ minds candidates are unlikely to shift between left and moderate lanes, but they can easily move been electable and non-electable categories. Joe Biden, for example, seems to be making such a transition.

Of course, the U.S. primaries are merely the first stage of the presidential election. Once the two parties have their nominees, then we will move on to the final vote in November.

In Ireland, the process is a bit more complicated, but with any luck it will be a lot less time-consuming. The country has the results of its general election, which was held on Saturday, and now a government has to be formed. Since no party has a particularly sizeable plurality—let alone a majority—the top vote-getting parties must enter into negotiations to work out some kind of governing coalition or arrangement.

Of the 160 seats in Dáil Éireann, 38 have gone to Fianna Fáil, 37 to Sinn Féin, 35 to Fine Gael (the incumbent governing party), and 12 to the Green Party. The remaining 38 seats are spread out over a collection of smaller parties and independent politicians. If you enjoy a good round of Sudoku, then have fun trying to put together a combination of those numbers to get to or above the governing threshold of 80.

The simplest solution on paper is a “grand coalition” of the two establishment parties (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) plus the Greens, but there are a whole lot of reasons why that is a problem for at least two of those parties. For one thing the Greens—as well as Labour (which tallied a mere 6 seats this time) and the now-extinct Progressive Democrats—have previously seen their fortunes seriously dashed by going into coalition with one of the big parties. Fianna Fáil has also been burned by propping up Fine Gael for the past four years. Such arrangements do nothing to dispel the increasingly popular notion that FF and FG are merely two wings of a single virtual political party.

Mindful that Sinn Féin actually won the popular vote and would have actually won the most seats if they had only run more candidates, the big parties seem content for now to let McDonald see what she can manage by combining her party’s 37 seats with those of smaller parties and independents. If she succeeds—and it has to be seen as a pretty darn big if—it will result in a history-making “coalition of the left.”

It will also mark a stunning triumph of populism.

Election Season

“Why, why why, could they not have had this reporting problem in 2004? Asking for a friend.”
 —Late Monday night tweet about the Iowa caucuses from Joe Trippi, veteran Democratic strategist who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004

Remember that old Chinese curse about living in interesting times? I wonder if whoever came up with that was thinking about something like the coronavirus. Or maybe early 21st-century election campaigns?

For the next few days I am in the interesting position of observing fascinating campaigns in both of my countries. The American one will go on quite a bit longer, but the Irish one will end on Saturday—closing an election period with the very civilized lifespan of a mere 25 days.

Usually, the only questions in an Irish election are as follows: will it be Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael that will form a government and will they have to find a coalition partner? If the polling is to be believed, however, things could be different this time. A major opinion poll released yesterday has Sinn Féin in first place with 25 percent, followed by Fianna Fáil at 23 percent and Fine Gael (the current government party) at 20 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Typical Irish election
social media humor

Opinion polls, of course, are not destiny, as people who dislike Brexit and Donald Trump know all too well. For whatever reason, Sinn Féin has historically underperformed its opinion polling, but of course that will continue to be true only until it isn’t. If Sinn Féin does indeed come in first, it will be huge. It will mean that Irish voters will have taken a major step away from the legacy factions of the 1922-23 Civil War toward a party that is a strange mixture of nationalist and socialist ideas and of which the primary raison d’être is the reunification of the island’s 32 counties. My own personal political intelligence (I follow a few college-age Irish people on Twitter) tells me that many young, as well as some not-so-young, voters are enthused about the prospect of a left-wing coalition that could comprise the Green Party, Sinn Féin, and a collection of other smaller parties and independents.

What about older—and generally more reliable—voters? The country is actually in pretty good shape in terms of employment and the economy, but there is a lot of unease over hospital waiting times and a persistent homeless crisis. Moreover, a string of spectacularly violent incidents involving feuding criminal gangs has created an impression of things spinning out of control. The polling might indicate that people are looking for change even if they little to complain about their own current personal circumstances.

Meanwhile, how about things in the U.S.? I have to confess that I got a frisson of déjà vu this morning when a radio bulletin informed me there was hiccup with the results of the Iowa caucuses. This follows the rather shocking discarding of the Des Moines Register poll, which is traditionally the final pre-caucus tea-leaves reading. If one is prone to conspiracy theories, one might be tempted to fear a cover-up or an attempt at massaging results. Other details that feed this paranoia: earlier polls were suggesting that Bernie Sanders would win and the fact that, in certain banana republics, delayed election results are a warning sign of mischief.

Worryingly, this is more likely to be something worse than vote tampering. It could be sheer incompetence. Think about it. The very same party that has been harping for more than three years about Russian hacking into social media and U.S. elections is not only the same one whose last presidential candidate was found to have been conducting all her government business on an unsecured email server in a closet in her home but which is now the same party that has attempted to collate its first 2020 voting results with a new app that did not work.

I’ll be honest. I’m getting very worried about the Democratic Party. Not only did it clearly fix its presidential nomination process four years ago for a pre-determined candidate, but this time around it seems determined to sabotage itself by frittering away its two-year term in control of the House of Representatives by doing nothing but relitigating the last election and offering no clear-cut vision for the next election. That is not to say that there are not new and interesting ideas out there in the Democratic Party, but the people who run the party seem determined to tap the energy of those ideas without seriously entertaining the ideas themselves.

For more than three years now Democrats have lectured us that President Trump is a threat to democracy because of his authoritarian tendencies. They impeached him for seeking an investigation of a political opponent. The problem is that half the country looks at the Democratic Party and sees it doing exactly what it accuses the president of doing: using its political office to launch endless investigations of a political enemy. What else does the Democratic congressional majority have to show for the past year?

If voters have concerns about the integrity of American elections, will they really be inclined to turn to the people in charge of this year’s Iowa Democratic caucuses? And which happens to be the same party that was so concerned about democracy that it engaged in a completely quixotic attempt to bar the other party’s president from being able to run for re-election?