How White Americans Became Irish (Part 3)
Pat Buchanan and Bill O’Reilly
In Part 3 of the story of how white Americans became Irish, we consider a spectrum of conservative perspectives.
A Politics of Resentment
Joe Biden’s Irish liberalism maintains a heroic role for the figure of the immigrant, primarily as a beacon and mirror of liberal tolerance. More conservative Irish in America have taken elements of the same Irish immigrant story of struggle to service a reactionary politics, one that also has a distinctive lineage and is articulated potently as a narrative of grievance in the current culture wars. (Notably, the Irish American journalist Pat Buchanan is credited with coining and fuelling “cultural war” in the early 1990s).
Conservative Irish attach themselves to a history of oppression in Ireland and ancestral struggle in the US but rarely with a sense that this should entail empathy for the oppressed of the present. Rather, there is a form of transference that has taken place whereby conservative Irish claim victimhood in the present as a means of disowning privilege or guilt.
Writing in 2020, Fintan O’Toole noted that “The centre of gravity of Irish-American politics now gathers around Trump: Mick Mulvaney, Kellyanne Conway, Brett Kavanaugh. A politics of white resentment has drowned out the plaintive wail of common sorrow.” Writing about how this politics of resentment played out in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Kavanaugh in September 2018, O’Toole observes:
The beauty of a specifically Irish Catholicism is that it has victimhood in its DNA. It has a genuine history of suppression and trauma. Even if you’re a very privileged white boy going to an elite Jesuit school like Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep (fees: $58,000 a year) you can claim ownership of the Great Famine and 800 years of oppression…we were immigrants, we were victims – and we still are, even when we’re in power.
The fusion of victimhood and privilege that was latent in the ethnic revivalism of the 1970s is now full blown across America political culture and mediascapes, manifesting in the politics not of empathy but of resentment and grievance.
A prominent gallery of Irish Catholic voices are stoking this cultural politics and calling for a new nationalism, led by what has been called the “alt-Irish” media and political personalities cheerleading for Trump, most volubly though not exclusively via Fox News platforms. While there are female voices in the gallery the ground tone and performance is demonstrably male and more particularly a pugnacious Irish masculinity portrayed as “hyper-American”. The journalist Andrew O’Hehir observes that “When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.”
Irish Slaves Myth
The myth of Irish slavery in the Americas is long-standing - the first recorded references emerged as part of the Southern pro-slavery propaganda of the late eighteenth century - and has received support from Irish nationalists both in Ireland and the US, albeit mostly as a form of analogy. In recent years it has been polemically weaponised by online media and memes to stoke the current culture wars and more particularly discourses of white grievance.
Starting in 2008 a number of articles appeared online, often under the heading “Forgotten White Irish Slaves,” and variations of these articles have appeared through to the present day. Certain features recur in the articles, they often appropriate atrocities committed against Black slaves by substituting Irish slaves as the victims. The Irish slavery myth has been readily debunked by scholars and online fact checkers both in Ireland and the US but this has not halted the online memeification. Liam Hogan, an Irish scholar who has assiduously tracked its paths in social media usage, notes: “The idea has permeated the collective consciousness of the social web to such an extent that few articles on the transatlantic slave trade or racism now slip by without someone introducing ‘white Irish slaves’ into the comments section.”
The Irish slavery meme has become increasingly visible since 2013, stimulated in part by the rise of Black Lives Matter. The trajectory of the meme has paralleled the intensification of protests around racial injustice in the US and contemporary events and discourses have become features of its production and consumption. The online backlash to Black Lives Matter frequently referenced the Irish slaves meme and also promoted the claim that “Irish Lives Matter” – a statement quickly commodified on t-shirts for sale on many online sites, while a Facebook group has used the same logo.
This became a widespread repudiation of the legacies of racism in the US that moved from the margins of alt-right sites to mainstream media, effectively normalising such views. In this, the promotion of the slaves meme is congruent with a broader take up of Irish mythology and iconography by alt-right communities. Natasha Casey has described white supremacist and nationalist groups as “deviant consumers of Irishness” and argues that they have “used the mainstream fascination with Irishness to appeal to wider and more general white audiences and boost their membership.”
The common drive and theme is a disavowal of racism under the guise of Irishness and while the alt-right communities might be viewed as marginal their influence has been increasingly mainstreamed within the conservative media ecosystem of a sharply polarised public sphere in the US. Fox News hosts frequently channel such views as when Kimberley Gilfoyle casually asserted “the Irish got over it. They don’t run around going ‘Irish Lives Matter.”
Fatherland
Just as memoirs and autobiographical tales have been a key source of left-liberal tellings of the Irish-American story, they have also served to narrativize and shape conservative memories of what it means to be Irish, though with very different readings of Irish and Irish-American history.
A recent example is the memoir published by National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home (2019), which was widely reviewed and lauded in mainstream American media. Dougherty tells his story of growing up with his single mother in the New Jersey suburbs, a young life overshadowed by an absent father in Ireland. The adolescent author disavows his Irishness but then turns to reclaim it following the death of his mother and birth of a daughter. He narrates the book as a series of letters to his father and in doing so embraces Irish nationalist history to fill the void in his identity.
The association between fathers and nationalism is clearly the core theme of the memoir and in the closing pages becomes explicitly political as Dougherty turns to contemporary American culture wars. In doing so he criticises the liberal “baby boomers” whose “myth of liberation…made my generation into powerless narcissists.” In contrast, Dougherty points to the words and deeds of Irish nationalists during the struggle for independence as evidence of an authentic identity that is irreducibly masculine.
The lesson for the US is clear: “a nation that is characterized by this fatherlessness, that ignores the real future that is incarnate before us, changes its society in a frightening way.” Out of an Irish past rises a story of American futurity, conjoining family, religion and nation in an imagined community. It is an appealing vision for mainstream conservatives in the US today, buttressing their emotional support for an aggressive white nationalism to displace the hegemony of liberal whiteness.
To be continued…
Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin.