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I was amused, reading yesterday’s Sunday Times, to see my old college acquaintance Professor David Kenny solemnly lecturing Conor McGregor on the fact that some the things the latter suggested he might do as President would be “constitutionally illiterate”.
You do not need to be, as David is, a professor of constitutional law to know that when McGregor said that as President, he could summon the Dáil, or “dissolve it entirely”, he was talking nonsense. You simply need to have a very basic knowledge of Irish civics, or failing that, to have read articles 12-14 of the constitution, which delineate Presidential powers.
Yet all the talk about constitutional reality in the world, I think, misunderstands the appeal of this:
As President I hold the power to summon the Dáil as well as dissolve it. So as i said before, I would have all the answers the people of Ireland seek from these thieves of the working man, these disrupters of the family unit, these destructors of small businesses, and on and on…
— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) September 5, 2024
There is not, I would argue, one single voter in existence who would have considered voting for Conor McGregor as President who will be reconsidering their stance on that considering something as irrelevant as McGregor appearing not to understand the job. Indeed, the idea that McGregor might act – or attempt to act – unconstitutionally as President is a very large part of his appeal in the first place.
Whether one is a supporter or an opponent of a putative McGregor Presidential campaign, the parallels with Donald Trump are mesmerisingly obvious: Both are charismatic outsiders. Both are (or have an image of being) self-made men who owe precisely none of their financial success to the establishment they would seek to displace. Partly as a result of the foregoing, neither man has any fear of saying what he thinks, because both are safe in the knowledge that they are effectively “uncancelable”. Both have (or appear to have) an entirely healthy loathing for the journalistic class, who are talkers when both men are “doers”.
The fundamental political appeal of both is similar: Both Trump and McGregor represent the ultimate rejection of everything that their respective country’s political and cultural elites hold dear. In Ireland, in particular, a country where the chattering class is almost maniacally obsessed with asking “what does X event say about us”, a McGregor Presidential victory would represent something close to the emotional apocalypse. If you want to send the ultimate signal that you’ve had enough, vote Trump. Vote McGregor. That’s the case in a nutshell.
As a writer who shares many – if not all – of the frustrations of voters moving in that direction, it’s very hard not to sympathise. Were McGregor on the ballot (he almost certainly won’t be, since nominations for President are in the gift of the political establishment, in effect) then I’d be inclined to vote for him for the above reasons alone. With McGregor, I get seven years of enjoyable columns in the Irish Times every time he opens his mouth. Few other candidates will be able to offer me more.
But there’s another reason, I think, that both men are popular: Both represent the idea of a shortcut to something greater.
Last week’s big story about the CPSE book heard around the world is an example of what many McGregor/Trump voters would argue to be deeply wrong about the state of how their respective countries are governed: Here’s a book that openly mocks the culture of its own country, being promoted as an educational aid for students in that very country’s classrooms. How did that happen?
It happened – I would argue – because the political left, or at least that branch of the left that concerns itself with such things, understands the difference between winning political office and wielding political power. Setting out to reverse the political culture of many Irish institutions is a task that only begins with the winning of political office, and not just one office. It would require – in the example of education alone – a Minister willing to fight civil servants over years. It would require, at minimum, changes in the law (which would be heavily resisted, up to and including strikes) to allow civil servants to be sacked or reassigned on ideological grounds. It would require a generation of political micromanagement from the Ministerial office, backed up by the full support of an engaged and supportive Taoiseach. At each step along the way, said Minister might expect to find a hostile media accusing them of doing exactly that which they were trying to reverse – politicising the curriculum; stacking committees with ideologues; complaining to the European Union about interference in education. All the while, said Minister would be working largely against the instincts and disposition of his or her civil servants.
It would be the same story in health. And in Justice. And in Culture. And in Media. And in Social Welfare. And in Finance, were a Minister to start defunding NGOs.
Regular readers will know that this is why this writer is not enamoured with Donald Trump: An objective assessment of that man’s record in office would begin and end with these questions – was the USA more or less “woke” after his four years in office? Was the institutional left (as opposed to the political left) stronger or weaker?
And of course, the US Presidency has more powers than the Irish one, as David Kenny correctly points out.
Part of the appeal of both Trump and McGregor, I fear, is the idea that the voter need only appoint the right strongman to fix the problems he or she has identified. The problem is that modern society is one in which political powers are very weak: One cannot imagine simultaneously that Irish politicians are mere pawns of Brussels, and then think that electing one man to a politically adjacent office would make much of a difference. That’s the thinking of the desperate, not the logical.
In modern democracies, political offices are just one of a whole series of interlocking institutions that wield political power. Capturing one of them is not enough. There are no shortcuts.
A McGregor Presidency would be very entertaining – on that you’ll get no argument from me. But nobody should imagine a McGregor victory would be transformative, or make much of a practical difference at all.
The same goes across the Atlantic, in November.
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