The Irish Problem
There is much truth in the Irish political joke that goes: “The problem with political jokes is that they get elected.”
I had never really thought about that before until 2016, when catastrophe hit the land and somehow a TV reality “star” got elected president of the USA. And started stocking his so-called administration with my tribe, Irish-Catholics.
My father was an Irish immigrant, and I grew up in a progressive Irish Catholic home where the Kennedys, problems and all, served as the model for what the Irish could do to make America a more perfect union.
Today, another Irish-Catholic, President Joe Biden, labors on that same enterprise of perfection, assisted by an impressive team of progressive Irish-Catholics such as Secretary of Labor, Mary Walsh, and Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, among others.
It was the Trump team of my tribe, however, that sounded the alarm bells and made me wonder what had gone so horribly wrong in the Irish-Catholic brain to make them think that serving Trump’s grifting, lying, corrupt, incompetent, and downright cruel agenda somehow connected with their Hibernian DNA?
Like so many things with Trump, though, that joke about political jokes getting elected is barely true when it is applied to his former administration, as only Irish-Catholic Mike Pence was voted in with Trump, and he is—shall we say –a touch lapsed, having diverted his spiritual path from Rome to that of evangelical Christianity. The rest of them, from Steve Bannon to Kellyanne Conway, from Sean Spicer to John Kelly to Mick Mulvaney to Mike Flynn, are all Irish-Catholics by their DNA. So, too, is Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House.
Which is a remarkable thing. It’s not as if the aforementioned held down obscure posts in the State Department (which, under Trump, no one did). They all held positions of key importance to the dysfunctional Trump White House, with many a pundit at the time calling Bannon the real president, and Trump the (formerly) twittering apprentice.
“A blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” is how Bannon described his origin story. And that hits the essence of the problem on the head. What the hell happened to make him the human battle standard for all that is rebarbative about Trump, aside from Trump himself?
And so, too, the rest of them. It’s as if they collectively forgot the hate and hardship directed at their Irish-Catholic ancestors who fled famine for America’s welcoming shores only to run smack into the nativist “Know-Nothings.” These Protestant Americans feared that hordes of Irish-Catholic immigrants would take jobs from real Americans and that their so-called religion of popery would pollute the purity of the American Protestant ideal. Indeed, posters around Boston in the mid-19th century proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.”
The Know-Nothings did everything from banning the Irish-Catholics from civilized society to burning down their churches to show true Christian virtue to these starving, desperate people. As history has a great sense of irony, many of these Irish-Catholics and their descendants went on to shape America’s greatest institutions and events, from the courts to the academy, to the media, to the battlefield, to the arena, to the Oval Office. And then some of them wound up as Know-Nothings, then and today still, accomplices of Trump.
This collision with our history got me thinking about whether there was something in the Irish-Catholic character—one which Freud famously did not say was impervious to psychotherapy – that was driving some of us into the kingdom of Trump? I mean, if Trump had filled key posts with German-American Mennonites, one would wonder if he was looking for free construction help (apparently his favorite kind) and for food in the Trump restaurants that finally really schmecks. So what’s was up with his apparent attraction to Irish-Catholics and theirs to him?
Well, loyalty for one (a one-way street in Trump’s case) to the point that they’ll say anything to defend Trump’s latest lie. So it’s Conway, née Fitzpatrick, who trotted out to lecture us on “alternative facts.” We saw Sean Spicer doing such a parody of the Irish blowhard bully-- ignorant of history and bereft of shame --in his press conferences that it was truly a testament to Melissa McCarthy’s talent that she could make us laugh even harder at him via her satire. Same with Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump (and not incidentally, both satirists are Irish-Catholics).
We can write off Conway and Spicer as having given the Blarney Stone the kiss it never forgot, and so, apparently, did Mike Flynn, but then again, we can’t. What, beyond loyalty, would make people who had, until this election, respected reputations, present themselves in such publicly humiliating positions, to defend the indefensible and to do so in high dudgeon?
Why would former altar boy Pence, and Homeland Security Secretary General John Kelly, who was a voice of reason until he wasn’t, line up to promote an agenda at such stark odds with their origins, and their faith—even if residually Catholic? Why would Paul Ryan, who still looks like he might sneak in an inning or two serving at Mass, and Georgetown grad and thus Jesuit-educated Mick Mulvaney want to rip apart all that Catholic social justice teaches in the name of slicing and dicing the budget? Didn’t their faith tell them that it isn’t going to get balanced ever, until we also remember what Jesus said about the logic of spending insane amounts of money on the machinery of war instead of education and health and caring for our weakest ("Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" Matthew 26:52).
The answer lies in fear, obedience, and rebellion, one that came to the Irish in a typically Irish way-- just when they thought they had it made. The Irish are the only people who embraced Christianity without the attendant bloody martyrdom, and so, in the 6th century, they invented the Green Martyrdom, whereby those seeking holiness would wander off into splendid isolation to commune with the divine. It was a perfect Irish solution. Just you and God up there on verdant hills.
Then along came the English invader, and the blood of the Irish Catholics would stain the Emerald Isle for centuries, turning the green martyrs red, and marrying their impulse for holy isolation into a political one, absolutely convinced of its righteousness. For in that long conflict with England, the Irish developed a keen sense of politics, of justice, and ss well as our gift for storytelling-- written in a language imposed upon us that dominates still the English literary canon. We also developed a mighty army of ideas backed up by the willingness to both kill and die for, and cloaked it all in fierce loyalty to the tribe, for betrayal of that tribe meant death.
As Anglo-Protestants cracked the cruel whip of rule, the Catholic Church became the distinctly disloyal opposition. The people took their direction, both spiritual and political, from the parish priest, who took his from the bishop, who took his from the cardinal, who took his from the Pope, for the model of the Catholic Church is nothing if not militaristic. As a result of that local clerical power, the people hated the official government and rebelled against it. They believed divine deliverance would come, while deeply fearing the wrath of the Church, which could literally consign them to hell if they disobeyed.
The result was a culture of rebellious obedience based on collective fear, a counter-intuitive idea to everyone who isn’t Irish, but which makes total sense to Steve Bannon, who even today, while facing criminal contempt of Congress charges connected to his role in the January 6 putsch attempt, wants to “deconstruct the administrative state”.
At the same time he obeys a white, Catholic intellectual conservatism that aligns him with the likes of Irish-American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a Catholic purist seen by many as leading the opposition to Pope Francis. Bannon’s vision is at once both pristinely intellectual, and violently bloody, as he has promised that his agenda will bring on the clash of civilizations, which certainly transcends the usual jokes about the bellicose Irish that one hears on the 17th of March.
As for the rest of the Irish-Catholics who marched with Bannon in the Trump administration, their conviction came from this Irish duality which has devolved from the famine Irish desperation to become American, into a suburban Irish resentment at having their America stolen from them by a rigged system favoring the “foreigner” (who is anyone not white, for starters). It’s the same impulse which makes a generation of Irish-Catholics prefer to believe the dangerous blarney of their fellow tribesman and Trump-whisperer Sean Hannity on Fox, than, say, their parish priest, who might be a Jesuit from Nigeria. Hannity has a more appealing pulpit.
And so we have rebellion against whatever they now hate or fear—immigrants, Muslims, Black and Latinx people, a federal government that serves justice and equality for all and so on –while being obedient to Cardinal Bannon’s theocracy and ex-Pope Trump’s enforcement.
Indeed, the continued wrath of Trump in exile at Mar-a-Lago will speed them to the burning lakes of damnation should they not shout down an observable fact or shout out a democracy-threatening Trump Big lie with volume and velocity. It’s the same kind of mind-set that saw generations of men and women in Catholic religious orders cover up egregious crimes to preserve the honor of the Church, whose stern authority had trumped the message of the rabbi from Nazareth about truth and justice and love. Same thing here.
We have substantial evidence of egregious crimes committed by Trump and his cohort, and lingering smoke from a few suspicious fires, and those are not the ones warming the corned beef and cabbage. Indeed, St. Patrick himself might be motivated to chase all the snakes out of MAGA-land should he wash up on these shores today, but then, why would he, since he never did so in Ireland?
And that’s the kind of alternative fact perfectly made for the descendants of brutalized Irish immigrants who continue to do so much to dishonor their ancestors this St. Patrick’s Day as they try to restore a regime best left to our nightmares. So it’s left to the rest of us who share their DNA to follow our own rebellious obedience based on the fear that if we don’t protect our legacy of justice and truth, and keep the O’MAGA snakes out of the White House, then we all get consigned to national hell. Which, of course, is what Trump’s Green Machine doubtless thinks of we Irish in opposition.
It’s a typically Irish problem, but salutary to remember that when it comes to defeating tyranny, the Irish always win.