Hibernia & Hyper-Normalisation
Ireland is politically unique among the countries of Europe—it is almost cliché to point it out. This uniqueness has certainly been present since the Civil War, but most likely its roots stretch as far back as the day Agricola stood on the western shore of the province of Britannia, looked out on the Irish Sea, and decided that the sea swells were too great and the cloudy skies too grey, more than any good Roman could be expected to bear.
This political distinctiveness presents a great set of challenges, for while across Europe and the Americas it appears that the centre cannot hold, it is ironically in Yeats’ own homeland that it may persist. To all political dissidents and opposition, whether on the Right or on embattled remnants of the true Left, this uniqueness represents a unique set of challenges. For the Right, it creates a certain kind of confusion and chaos, and it is left heavily uncertain with how to approach the Irish political public with ideas that are innately popular to a great many, but unfashionable for most to even mention.
As for the radlib Left, it appears that it is to be swallowed up altogether. There is very little policy that it can hold which cannot be snatched up by the other parties. All socio-cultural positions it holds are held unanimously across the range of party elites. Any unique political theory it believes in is more often a cause of division amongst themselves, and a cause of confusion for the onlooking masses. The only remaining thing it has to offer, increased social spending, is a bitterly fought corner, as centre-Left parties (Labour, Sinn Féin, Social Democrats) competitively try to outbid each other on that issue for votes.
Blairism and the Bobo Echo-Trap.
In political-economic terms, all these Irish centre-Left parties cannot be thought of as anything more radical than Blairite. What we call Blairism goes by many names across the continent, but it is ultimately always the same fatally-flawed thing. What in the late-nineties was a concession to neoliberal, free-marketeer fiscal policy has in fact become the loadstone of Europe’s centre-Left. One-by-one these parties ditched their working-class roots for middle class voters, they broke from ‘economic Leftism’ and moved to social Liberalism, which has in turn gradually consumed all other ideals and became the centre-Left’s only constant dogma.
The upper-middle class sensibility of tolerance has been joined at the hip to the likewise educated and sensible acceptance of Chicago School economic policy. The result of this union has been that these parties have now become incapable of offering the same degree of social spending they once did. All the while the middle class which the centre-Left pinned its fortunes on has dwindled away.
The only constituency which the once-great centre-Left parties of Europe now aspire to is the good conscience vote of the Bohemian-Bourgeois (or more colloquially known as Bobos). Here they are in dire conflict with the Greens, who greatly benefit from all waves of environmental alarmism, and who can largely oscillate their fiscal positions to appease any general mood, or political coalition, at the time.
You can say that this Bobo class is a kind of ‘echo-chamber’, but the truly important thing to understand about it is this: the leadership who seek to use this chamber as a political support base are also enclosed within it. Any hopes from the original 2016 populist upset that mainstream parties would learn and re-evaluate themselves has been sorely mistaken. The resilience of this neoliberal ‘echo-chamber’ has been severely underestimated.
If one followed the coverage of English politics from papers such as the Guardian between 2017 and 2019, you would have been fully convinced that the collapse of Boris Johnson’s administration and the overturning of Brexit was imminent, and of course we have all seen how that has turned out. Corbyn, England’s ‘Great Red Hope’, took an initial stance of upholding Brexit and of returning to a pre-Blair pro-spend policy. This gave Labour their resurgence in 2017, and if it had been followed, it would have given them a solid decade of unchallenged power.
Instead, Corbyn had his brief surge reinterpreted by his party’s elite, who are nearly all drawn from the Bobo class. They proceeded to convince themselves it was the Remainer comeback they so desperately wanted it to be. Coupled with a bogus anti-Semitism smear campaign, Corbyn was browbeat into taking up a muddled pro-remain position, which has now consigned Labour to perpetual political irrelevance. The last major mention I heard of Corbyn was several months back, watching a Late-Night-Comedy-Show-Host™ taking a ‘special serious moment’ to lambast Corbyn. While on the surface it was a school-child scolding for Corbyn’s refusal to acknowledge said bogus charges, in spirit the scolding was really for breaking the Bobo ranks and momentarily threatening the Professional-Managerial class’ stranglehold on Labour’s leadership. Poor Corbyn.
All of which is to say that this neoliberal, centre-Left constituency is not only a mere ‘bubble’ that can be popped, or a silly naive ‘echo-chamber’ that can be walked out of—it is an entire echo-trap. The political leadership of the Bobo class are no more capable of seeing beyond the horizons of their limited dogmas than their own base. And while there are definitely more cynical actors in their leadership, they know better than the rest that breaking ranks is committing social suicide. No more cheese and wine nights with David and Catherine. For virtually all of them, base and leadership, everything that lies outside their worldview is a fundamentalist threat which is to be either decried or derided.
But worst of all for Ireland is that virtually the entirety of Ireland’s political elite is ensnared in this virtue-signalling charade, forming a bubble around us both culturally and geographically.
Ireland: Apolitical or Politically Unique?
One could ascribe the cause of this to the relative absence of a conservative or general right-wing tradition in post-Catholic Ireland. Arguably the very presence of such a tradition and its own leadership could introduce some political diversity, variety, and tolerance for dissent among our broader elite, as it does in England, the USA or other European countries. However, this is missing the essence of the problem.
As a friend once said to me, the political nature of Ireland and the Irish people is in the end a very pragmatic one. Attempting to understand political Ireland through the matrix of modernity’s Left-Right dichotomy will only leave you with an impression of intense confusion and syncretism about the many organisations in the country. Irish politicos rack their minds trying to explain the likes of Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, or the Healy-Raes to their international friends. It can also lead to brain-dead takes such as the Indo-reading Neocon-wannabes describing Sinn Féin as ‘fascists’ because they are both nominally ‘nationalist’ and ‘socialist’, or Leftists describing Fine Gael as ‘fascist’ because of their Blueshirt roots and corporate policies.
Politics that occur in line with the ‘objective political spectrum’ are something that can only really evolve from a society with a high degree of urban development, and more importantly an advanced level of social atomisation and individualism. Ireland has never really adopted the modern political spectrum because it has never really urbanised, and it did not ditch its old structures of kinship groups until relatively late, if it ever has.
In other Western nations, politics is more of a direct interface between the individual and the central sovereign nation-state. There is only him and the nation, and the nation should be best governed according to the ‘objective laws of reason’, and this makes domestic politics an arena where the people fight over what they believe these ‘objective laws’ are. These different beliefs are then arranged in the general Right-Left spectrum. In order to prevent the nation tearing itself apart over these beliefs, a difference of opinion has to be respected, along with measures such as elections and peaceful power transfers.
Irish people prefer consensus in our beliefs. We are primarily concerned with what is best for ‘the Clan’. Unlike other Westerners, your political views are not the sacrosanct decisions of your individual conscience. When your clan has made its decision you keep your beliefs to yourself and fall in line. You do not have some inalienable right to disadvantage your clan because your ‘conscience dictates it’.
Personally, I have seen this in the difference between the political arguments of other Westerners and the political arguments of Irishmen. If you are out with the former, and a difference of opinion pops up at the table, they are usually familiar with the arguments of both sides. Sometimes their eyes seem to light up, they seem excited to have a chance to discuss very deep-level issues, almost fascinated by how such fundamental beliefs can be so different.
By contrast, at an Irish table, if you look about when a difference of opinion pops up, you will see people laugh nervously and look away, some will try to paper over the dispute with a joke, and sometimes they will come up with an impromptu and syncretic middle-ground between the two parties with an impressive speed. They want the dispute to be put aside as soon as possible. It is as if a difference of opinion triggers a fear buried in the blood memory, the fear of the Clan being split.
And yet the next minute these same Irishmen will seem to have no problem with furious shouting matches about the tiny ‘whodunnits’ of various historical personalities, and the minute blow-by-blows of obscure events. When we argue history we find ourselves arguing over the personal characters of our ‘Chiefs’, our Taoisigh, rather than the principles of a party leader. A political argument in Ireland is an exercise in name-dropping and revealing incidents; the more obscure, local, and intimate the knowledge, the better.
In some ways the Irish nation and society has itself become the new Clan. Our political factions are not based on ‘beliefs derived from Reason’, but on what courses of action the nation should take. If we have any spectrum it is between the more radical and the less radical. Despite what some Republicans may say, our Civil War was not between Left and Right, nor between Nationalists and anti-Nationalists, but between Nationalists and even more radical Nationalists. (Funnily Ireland is quite similar to Japan of all countries in this way, but that comparison could take up a whole book.)
When we do see radicalism in ideology, Right or Left, it is really an inchoate way of expressing and compounding the radicalism of one’s dedication to the national cause. Many parties, especially on the Left, would be totally and utterly unpalatable to the Irish public if they were presented purely on merit of their ideas. Instead these Leftist-Republican groups have to be sold to the Irish public on their nationalist credentials.
The downside of this political nature is that the pendulum can easily swing away from radicalism and back to a kind of pure deracinated ‘pragmatism’, which is by its nature disinterested, unprincipled, and ultimately corrupt. Failings can always be justified in the name of results—it is not a long road from “sure who cares if he took bribes, he got the roads built”, to “sure who cares if we’re a tax haven for multinational corporate monopolies and are flooded with cheap foreign labour, there’d be no economy without them!”
The great irony of the progressive cultism of the Irish elites is that the newest ideas are adhered to in the oldest ways. The neoliberal ideology, born of a post-Fordist global information market, has its monopoly over our national mind cemented by a clannishness that predates the Industrial era itself.
An Isle Bound ‘Round with Blind Horizons.
Although its adherents laud it for its principles of ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’, Neoliberalism really has a distinction for systematically working to exclude all possible alternatives to itself. It is especially good at this since it does so nearly entirely through subliminal means, utilising some of the most subtle and intelligent propaganda known to man. Its drive to exclude competitors or alternate systems likely comes from two main sources. While some of my Christian friends disagree, I believe one source is its strong pedigree from that Universalist system, which has been elaborated on by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist. Another more pertinent, and certainly more certain cause is its position as the triumphal victor of the Cold War, and its role as the hegemonic ideology of the Unipolar moment, thus heralding the so-called ‘End of History’.
This phenomenon where now all who live under Neoliberalism struggle to imagine, much less fight for, anything that is meaningfully different from it was perhaps best captured by Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism. Capitalist Realism represents the state of having internalised what is historically just one kind of political, social, and economic arrangement as being a manifestation of ‘reality’ itself. As a consequence of Fisher’s work we frequently hear today the near-constant refrain from the scattered remnants of the dissident Left, urging us on to “imagine new alternatives”. In fact, their calls are sometimes even more desperate than this. They say that before we can even do that, the need to regain our bare ability to “imagine new alternatives”. In some ways a stunning indictment of the creative abilities of the Left, but more significantly a great testament to Neoliberalism’s ability for crushing its rivals before they’re even conceived, something akin to Kronos consuming his own offspring.
However, this is not the first time such a scenario has arisen. Something very much like Capitalist Realism was witnessed before in the Soviet system. This was Hypernormalisation. This term was coined by Alexei Yurchak to describe the phenomenon in the late Soviet Bloc, where there was widespread awareness that the system was in decline, yet there was an inability to imagine life outside that system. As a response, people doubled down in their efforts to maintain the façade that everything was working, and even came to fully internalise this façade as reality, simply because no alternative was conceivable.
Such a scenario of Hypernormalisation is well underway in Ireland. It is partly caused by the Clan mentality fixating collectively on Neoliberalism, and this factor will certainly compound it going forwards. Vestiges of our post-colonial inferiority complex will also play into this. Across the world Bobos are universally characterised by their need for and worship of social status, but for Irish Bobos this need to be perceived as being cosmopolitan and worthy in the eyes of their international peers is a pure gut-level desperation. There is little else that is closer to their hearts than status, and this Neoliberalism offers in buckets.
Like the former Soviet Union, our Hypernormalisation is not happening in a vacuum. However, the way in which possible alternatives are arising abroad and outside of our nation does not necessarily help in breaking the spell. Neoliberalism is a universalist ideology and is thus prone to dualisms, in this way it seeks to compress the broad range of alternative systems down into one easily identifiable enemy category –’populism’ or, increasingly since Biden’s new foreign policy pivot, ‘authoritarianism’.
The fact that some of the original advents of populism, first with Brexit and now under Boris, occurred in England has not helped the case for alternatives to Neoliberalism in Ireland (although I would argue both of these are cases of Neoliberalism working under a populist guise but this is irrelevant, given that they are both heavily perceived as populism by the Irish political public). Again we find another paradoxical conflation of the old and the new working to defend Neoliberalism. We revolt at ‘populism’ because we associate it with the “ancient enemy”. We try to differentiate ourselves in opposition to our historical opponents by identifying our national identity with the ideology that seeks to erase and nullify all such distinctions. “Being Irish is about being tolerant and cosmopolitan, unlike those nasty Brits.”
The result of this is that the prospects for political dissidents in Ireland are not promising, at least for the short to medium term. Instead we will have to prepare ourselves for an intensely frustrating political interval. As Neoliberal Ireland lurches from one crisis into another, many will repeatedly attempt to paper up the cracks with the very ideology that causes them. As many of our countrymen see that things are not quite working out the way they would like them too, instead of re-evaluating Neoliberalism at its very roots, their solution will be to exclaim “our problem is that we haven’t been liberal enough!”. Should the crises really ramp up, it is likely that the Irish electorate and certainly the political classes will try every variation of Neoliberalism, or Liberalism in general, before they willingly come over to dissident traditional, illiberal, and right-populist ideas, and even then a fair amount will never come around at all.
For all dissidents in the meantime, we must be ready for the most disappointing thing of all to happen—nothing. For the coming few years we cannot be demoralised when our role as dissidents lacks much of that great excitement which we have been misleadingly gaslit into believing comes with the territory. For in Hypernormalisation, political dissidence means something very different from what it has been romanticised as.
Dissidence will mean the patient navigation of our hypernormalised national landscape, one that will become increasingly more alien to us with each passing day. It will also mean the patient cultivation of ourselves, through exercise, self-education, and the development of our own careers. It will mean patience in our mutual networking and assistance with each other, unglamourous, unexciting, but steady and productive. In interacting with the “non-converted” it will often mean keeping your opinion to yourself in order to retain a friend, a connection, or a job rather than lose those things for the sake of “being right”. Every day we survive as right-wing dissidents and nationalists is now a victory, every small improvement we bring to ourselves and to each other is a victory.
If there is any space for cautious optimism, it is this—when hypernormalised systems do finally fall, they fall all at once. If or when such a fall comes, we need to ask ourselves what kind of people will we be when it does?