It is a very great pity, for those in power, and a good many of those aspiring to power, that they must put up with the Irish people. And the British people. And the French, and the Americans, and so on.
Consider all the problems that the Irish Government, and media, consider most pressing: The filthy public are in the process of destroying the world by owning too many cows, and too many cars. They are dangerously loudmouthed and must be regulated and prevented from engaging in hate speech. They are having too many children. They are burning too much gas. They are vaping too many e-cigarettes. They are drinking too much alcohol. They are not paying their TV licences, or reading enough newspapers, meaning they must be forced to cough up the money anyway. Some of them won’t take their vaccines. Some of them won’t wear their masks. They are transphobic and queerphobic and xenophobic and biphobic and, to top it all off, a shower of NIMBYs. Some of them, even, are taking too many holidays. On RTE this week, we heard that the Irish people are obsessed with their luxuries, defined, in that particular case as, well, eggs and milk.
I mention all of this – all of them complaints directed at the Irish public within the last year – because it is useful, perhaps, to remember that we live in a democracy. In a democracy, the theory goes, those in power are there to serve the public, who in turn have the power to remove them from power should they fail to do so. Politicians are supposed to represent the interests of the public.
That, though, very often, is not the case. Consider for a moment the matter of minimum alcohol pricing, to cite just one example. There was no political demand for this policy. There were no marches by the public down O’Connell street demanding that the price of a beer rise in order to protect the public from our own misbegotten choices. The advocates for the policy were – and this is a full list – Alcohol Action Ireland, a group set up by the Government, funded by the Government, to mount a public campaign for what the Government wanted to do.
Almost all political energy these days is expended not on serving people, but on fixing them. Improving them. Making the great unwashed more tolerable to those in power. More sober. More green. More tolerant. Less unbearable.
We now have whole global forums devoted to bettering the great unwashed. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” was a line uttered at once such forum, which sounds much more like an instruction than a promise.
The desires of human beings have not much changed, really, over human history. We organised into families, and then communities, and then states, in that order. We did so for basic reasons: So that collectively, we could provide security to the individual. These are the purposes of states: to ward off threats, allowing us to marry, or partner, have children, build a home, and live in peace. All of the other purposes have been invented, almost always by those who find their fellow citizens unsatisfactory.
And so it is now that even education is no longer, really, about equipping the child, but programming them. So great is Government paranoia that a child might think for themselves that we now have children’s books in schools reminding toddlers that they may not really be girls, or boys, according to the new state religion. Mathematics is almost a secondary concern for many involved in modern education, who increasingly seem to see the primary purpose of that activity as being to ensure that nobody is ever offended by a stray, independent, thought.
The national broadcaster, as I wrote yesterday, now considers some thoughts simply too dangerous to broadcast to the public, lest anybody agree with them. That is why George Monbiot gets airtime to condemn you for your love of eggs, but anybody saying “hang on, this is mad” cannot be allowed to respond, lest somebody agree with them.
This is not Government from confidence, but Government from fear. In their hearts, western Governments know that much of what they are doing is monumentally unpopular. They have known it since 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost. That is why so much effort is now openly spent on ensuring such a thing never happens again.
Indeed, when this writer was on Pat Kenny, last week, to talk about the proposed TV licence reforms, Fianna Fáil Senator Timmy Dooley actually said as much. We need RTE, he announced to the nation, to ensure that nothing like Donald Trump ever happens here.
Which, when you think about it, is just protectionism: He wants to take your money and give it to RTE and others with the explicit mandate to make sure that no radical ever comes along and takes his voters.
The whole thing is being structured – and admitted as being structured – to prevent the voters from ever revolting against the people in power. That’s not my analysis, it’s Timmy Dooleys’.
This, more than anything else, is what is driving the rise of populism. More and more voters are getting the sense that their leaders just don’t very much like them, or trust them. And you know what? They’re right.