Common Sense Populism and the Irish Revolt - On a Timely Conference in Brussels and the National Voice
Ireland’s vox populi, her voice of the people, was heard loudly on March 8th. A resounding victory for common sense and democratic accountability, the two proposed constitutional changes were rejected with landslides of 67.69% and 73.93%. Just one constituency from a total of 39, Dún Laoghaire in South Dublin, supported one of the proposed amendments, whilst rejecting the second. Notably, the Donegal constituency said No to both changes with more than 80% of their votes. And it wasn’t only the ruling coalition who were pushing for Yes votes, but almost the entire Dáil, including the main supposed opposition party, Sinn Féin, whose supporters emphatically rejected the guidance of their bizarrely woke leadership. Moreover, this glorious victory for the normie public over establishment elites occurred despite the scandalous (and arguably treasonous) fact that, as Senator Michael McDowell put it, the “Irish people were victims of a campaign of sustained concealment by their own government”.
Senator Michael McDowell
Regime elites, as the referendum clearly illustrates, are treacherously disconnected from the public. This disconnect becomes especially evident when elected representatives appear far less interested in pursuing Ireland’s national interests than in seeking plaudits from ludicrously overfunded NGOs; from an incestuously collaborative media; from an ivory tower poisoned to its marrow with competence dissolving Diversity-Equity-Inclusion puritanism; and from totalitarians in Brussels hell bent on coercively homogenizing Europe into a Brave New Multikulti-Green-Rainbow Reich. Building the sort of nation within which the Irish family and participatory folk-spirit can flourish into the future would seem, sadly, less of an elite priority than building their own CVs as enforcers of imperial orthodoxy through the unscientific cult of Climatism, and through cynical “victimism, which uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.”
By their fruits you shall know them. Apparent priorities of establishment elites are blatantly incompatible with the future flourishing of the public. Ireland’s regime has appeared more excited about the indoctrination of Irish children with degenerate gender ideology than they are about nurturing sturdy citizens who grow up honouring their ancestral and cultural heritage; issuing woke sermons on “white privilege” and passing Soviet inspired “hate speech” laws appear greater priorities to the Irish regime than patriotism or protecting political dissent. Rodd Dreher recently summarized this nearly ubiquitous Western calamity:
“The regimes in power define any opposition to open borders, to forever war, to DEI, transgenderism, wokeness and all the rest, as a threat to Our Democracyä. Meanwhile, they have created, and continue to build, a world nobody can love or defend, because it is insane.”
I have previously argued at length that Ireland Needs New Elites. The fact that Irish farms are being driven to destruction for supposed “green” reasons at a time of increasing global population, and increasingly precarious global supply chains, tells us a good deal of what we need to know. As does the fact, despite neutrality, Ireland’s NGO sector gets 5 times the government funding of our neglected Defence Forces at a time of increasing geopolitical instability. So too for what I argue to be an utterly reckless approach to immigration during an ever-worsening housing crisis, a crumbling health system, and 75% of the Irish public thinking it has gone too far. Not to mind the fact rainbow psychosis has resulted in obviously lunatic situations including a violent Brazilian man, Barbie Kardashian, being held in Limerick women’s prison.
Barbie Kardashian
But to question any of this insanity is to be called climate denier, transphobe, xenophobe, “far right”, or some other label from a vast list of low-resolution insults. We would do well to ignore these accusations; they are merely tools to shut down debate. Too often we have seen members of the common sense public socially or even professionally cancelled for raising reasonable concerns about issues that affect their lives, their loved ones, or their communities. The three areas of woke derangement, authoritarian Covid policy, and apocalyptic climate alarmism provide the best examples of politically correct tyranny in action: ‘All white people are racist and transwomen are women you far right working class scum’; ‘Don’t question our viral origins story or the fact you need to partake in a Nuremberg defying medical experiment you granny killing conspiracy theorist’ ‘Eat vegan bugs and give up your cars you Gaia raping science-denying parasite’.
Core components of this politically correct totalitarianism – what I call Compascism – include the weaponization of compassion related virtue, identitarian power hierarchies, aspirational victimhood and, perhaps most importantly, the use of scapegoats. On this last point, I will quote from a World War 2 era essay, The Peace, by warrior-poet extraordinaire, Ernst Jünger:
“Modern man has a fatal propensity for attempting to free himself of his own feelings of guilt, his own anxieties and terrors, by projecting them onto some scapegoat, some incarnation of absolute evil, which he burdens with all the sins, all the shortcomings that he cannot face within himself.”
And for the post-2016 Compascist, the scapegoat par excellence has become the ‘populist’.
I wrote that last section about cancel culture and the populist as scapegoat in a first draft, on a flight to Brussels, not long after the referendum. This is relevant for an odd synchronicity of sorts: while waiting at baggage collection in the airport soon after landing, I learned that, after his government’s referendum annihilation, Leo Varadkar had announced his resignation as Taoiseach while I was in the air. (Note: it is easy to forget that Varadkar was the leader of the country despite being only the second most popular politician in his own constituency in the last election; he was eventually elected by the skin of his teeth after 5 ballot counts to find enough votes. Brendan O’Neill of Spiked has put together a damning analysis of Varadkar’s turning of Ireland into a “laboratory of the new illiberalism”. The same publication briefly outlined Varadkar’s “woke authoritarianism”. Is it any real surprise that Varadkar’s Fine Gael was sent scurrying with 12 TDs having already jumped ship?)
Varadkar’s announcement took place on Wednesday March 20th, 12 days after the Irish public issued what I suggested would be a two fingered salute to the regime and their politically correct mess. This struck me as an amazingly coincidental piece of news not only given what I had been writing about while our Taoiseach resigned, but given my very reason for travel: I was attending a conference on European populism.
The event, Is Europe’s Future Populist?, was hosted by MCC Brussels, a think tank which has produced extensive and accessible reports on a wide array of important topics including EU energy policy, agricultural policy, family policy, and online censorship. There was roughly a dozen speakers from across Europe and I took 17 pages of notes throughout the day. As such, an exhaustive analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. All three sessions, however, are available to view (session 1, session 2, session 3). But as a good starting point, I would direct interested readers toward the opening remarks by Frank Füredi, MCC Executive Director, and the keynote speech by Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. And from among a host of fascinating speakers, Jeremy Stubbs of French magazine Causeur, Mick Hume of the European Conservative, and Ralph Schoellhammer of Webster University of Vienna all stood out as having captured something of the zeitgeist of our common sense populist moment.
Füredi opens asking “why do they hate populism so much?” On the disdain held by establishment elites for populists, he describes it as a 21st century version of racism “where it’s almost like they regard people who are populist as morally and racially inferior to the way they think. And what’s very interesting is that whenever they sneer at populists, they don’t acknowledge the fact that they exist.” Füredi then describes how populism “is a movement where people are commanding to be heard and taken seriously.” And using the Irish referendum as an example, he said that “when the people are able to find their voice, something magical happens.”
Stubbs asks “how far are a state and a nation to be equated?” “Today”, he continues, “states are weak where they should be strong, and strong where they should be weak. They are weak in defending borders, they are weak in fighting drug dealers, they are weak in fighting human trafficking – which is a large part of what immigration is. But they are strong when it comes to you and me. We put a foot wrong, they’re down on us.”
Hume describes how there was a “fundamental divide between the EU elites and the people”, and that this “reality gap” was evident in the green transition and mass immigration. Hume highlights the strange use of the phrase “far right” in asking if it was “far right to hate Hamas? Because that is what you get called.” “Is it far right to support the farmers?” “Is it far right to be a parent who opposes pornographic drag acts being performed in front of children?”
Schoellhammer opens describing how, to his elderly mother who does not use social media or the internet, much of what is now called “far right” is simply “common sense”. He then describes how the “true strength of democracy is that the public gets to voice dissatisfaction and drive course correction.” However, it is also true that universities, think tanks, and the media are all important sources of power and social influence alongside political office and state bureaucracy. As such, Schoellhammer argues that the populist Right need to realise that there is a massive difference between “being in office and being in power”, and that this needs to be planned for in advance of electoral success so that the Right is not like “the dog that caught the car.”
Goodwin argues that we “are living through the greatest radicalization of the elite class since the 1960s”, and that the ruling class is distinguishing itself from the public based on moral values. In support of this claim he references research by More in Common which found that across Western societies, only about 15% of the population are woke but that they dominate our institutions. And this “woke” ideology, according to Goodwin, is the “sacralisation of racial, sexual, and cultural minorities”. Unless the minority happens to be Jewish, of course. This brings me to something else he said worth highlighting off the back of my essay on reckless immigration, The Strange Death of Ireland. To Goodwin, one of the biggest threats facing the West is the unholy alliance between a radical woke left and radical Islamism. “They share many things in common”, he said. “They’re both revolutionary, they’re anti-democratic, they’ll both happily sacrifice free speech on the altar of their ideological claims. They’re anti-Semitic.” (Such “Islamo-gauchisme” was arguably evident in the attempted cancellation of the conservative event, NatCon Brussels 2, not long after Goodwin’s comment.)
When it comes to a host of major issues like food and energy insecurity, military defence incapability, reckless immigration, and attacks on the bedrock democratic requirement of free speech, Europe has shown itself to be an unserious place and, to varying degrees, Ireland has been an especially unserious nation.
But given the manifest anti-Nationalist worldview of the Irish regime, this is to be expected. In a piece published a few weeks prior to the MCC conference, Frank Füredi argued that Populism Is The People’s Answer To The De-Nationalisation Of Their Elites. He makes the case that across the West we have been led by globalist elites with a worldview that “looks down on national culture and its traditional values”:
“Cosmopolitan minded politicians simply fail to understand people’s national attachments. Nor can they grasp why millions of Europeans have decided to support political movements that they denounce as populists. They are so far removed from the lives of ordinary people that there is no real point of political contact between these two sections of society. That is why the cosmopolitan elites do not even understand those people who are targets of their hate. Populism is about many things but above all it is the people’s answer to those who would dispossess them of their national identity.”
Füredi describes how these globalist elites “feel closer to their transnational friends than to fellow citizens ‘who do not think like us’.” To bring this home, has Varadkar not shown himself closer in worldview to other “woke authoritarians” like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern or Scotland’s Humza Yusuf, than he is with the vast majority of the Irish public? Meanwhile, a refreshingly Nationalist leader like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – a man who, like the vast majority of the public, rejects deranged social engineering projects like reckless immigration or the sexualization and gender-cult indoctrination of schoolchildren – is smeared relentlessly by European elites.
Irish politics has been adrift in a tranquilized and stale malaise without genuinely Nationalist movements capable of gaining mass support. France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Portugal and more, however, are making moves: populism is on the rise across Europe and, as the glorious rejection of the curiously sinister referendum suggests, alongside recent polling trends, Ireland might finally be starting to join in common sense populist revolt.
That said, if unapologetically patriotic stars are to align over the coming months in local, European, and general elections, such common sense sentiment will need to find expression in authentically Nationalist talent capable of capturing sufficiently popular imagination. Only time will tell if Ireland’s vox populi, against massive establishment efforts, will continue to find its voice.