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.

Beyond Reason

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
 —Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality, 1721

How do you form your political opinions? How do any of us?

Depending on where you are on your life’s journey, you may be struggling to work out the right and wrong of every political issue or, if you are older, your positions may well be be encased in concrete.

My sense is that most, if not all, of us like to think we arrive at our opinions sensibly and logically. That we take in all the evidence and arguments and then arrive the right view through reason while applying self-evident moral standards.

Over time, though, when our conclusions repeatedly land in the same place in agreeing with certain friends, politicians and/or a political party (call them your politics peer group), it might become easy to simplify the political judgment process by simply following the lead of those people you’ve come to trust for their political judgment. Or more likely, you may have found news sources that you have come to trust and it so happens that you and your politics peer group usually, if not invariably, have the same reactions to each fresh news report.

What I’ve just described, however, amounts to choosing a side. And once you’ve chosen a side, your reasoning is no longer deductive. It has become inductive. In other words, rather than examining the evidence neutrally and seeing where it leads, you are starting with a conclusion and looking for information to back it up. When it comes to modern politics, there are plenty of news sources and opinion makers to provide that selective information to you—also known as talking points.

Is it even possible to look at political issues neutrally? Probably not. The best we can likely do is to be as aware as possible of our own core values and to use them rigorously as a yardstick against each issue that comes along. The risk in that, though, is that occasionally your conclusions might not perfectly match your politics peer group. In fact, people who are very individualistic and committed to deductive reason will find that they have no ideological home. You may occasionally find yourself disagreeing with people you admire and respect or on the same side as people you don’t like very much.

It can be kind of lonely. People who are very hard-core about their politics—the kind who have litmus tests for friendships—won’t trust you. Worse, reality may trip you up. You will eventually come up against the fact that the question of right and wrong in the real world is often not as clear as we would like.

When I was younger and more idealistic, my position on capital punishment was unyielding. Taking a life was wrong. That is an eminently satisfying position when it came to innocent people on death row purely because of their social and racial circumstances. It’s a bit harder to muster enthusiasm for pushing that position energetically when the person in question is a monster like Ted Bundy or Timothy McVeigh. Things get muddier still when we realize that society makes decisions about human life and death all the time, albeit usually in a more indirect way. And then there’s the flipside to the capital punishment question: abortion. If you accept that a viable fetus (i.e. which would likely survive if prematurely delivered) in the womb is some sort of human life, many if not most people would judge that it can be reasonably sacrificed for any number of reasons, especially if it is to save the mother’s life.

In other words, the position that human life cannot be considered absolutely sacrosanct without exception is not tenable in the real world. Reality requires society to make choices with winners and losers. Once you accept that, things get messy indeed.

Perhaps that is why it is easier for us to concentrate on who we would rather have as winners and losers instead of adhering strictly to moral principles. That won’t stop us, however, from framing our arguments as being based on morality even if they’re really about partisanship.