We used to call them counterrevolutionaries. Some would’ve called them petty bourgeois. Now we call them centrist dads.
Last month David McWilliams called the results of the local elections, when Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil claimed a disputable victory, “revenge of the centrist dads”. I don’t know what centrist dads, that group with the attempt at a reclaimed pejorative, had to avenge after more than 100 years of an Irish state created in their image and with, at least some of, their material interests seen to. You can question the truth of their consciousness but they’ve made their choices. Revenge implies some form of loss and, “If they’re losing, who’s winning?” like Chris Rock said. Only a tweet all the same.
Pat Leahy in the Irish Times and Thomas Hubert in The Currency both invoked Yeats: “Can the centre hold? Yes, it can,” wrote the former; “ruling parties will say that the centre holds,” the latter. Both possibly said something unintended about the ruling class project when each acknowledged the move this so-called centre had made to consolidate its power: “the centre has moved to a tougher line on asylum seekers. That tends to be the way Irish politics works,” wrote Leahy; “the centre has likely moved,” wrote Hubert.
In France this month there was no such reprieve for that country’s centrists in its legislative elections. If Fine Gael’s victory in our local elections was disputable, the Nouveau Front Populaire’s was more decisive, while not delivering an outright majority. The movement has no formal leader though Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far left La France Insoumise, one of the parties brought together as part of the front, is its most visible and vocal figure.
Take a look at what his class enemies say about him: “He is known for unbridled tax-and-spend proposals, class war rhetoric and controversial foreign policy positions, particularly on Gaza,” says Sky News; “Mélenchon is interested in fire, rage, revolution and fuelling a vision of France that is disconnected from reality,” says the Guardian; “Mélenchon has long had a reputation as a political bruiser with a volcanic temper,” says the Financial Times. In the aftermath of Mélenchon’s movement’s victory the Telegraph told us, “Macron emboldened France’s increasingly hateful left.”
Fantastique. Jean-Luc: if I could’ve, I would’ve.
‘It’s about whose money we should use in order to govern’
What the Nouveau Front Populaire, a flawed but electorally effective coalition, did was give voters an unashamedly left programme to support: a programme about the allocation of resources and, yes, division and polarisation. (Two terms considered bad words by the liberals who’ve used both effectively to establish our decaying worlds.)
“It’s about whose money we should use in order to govern. For the past seven years, the Macronists have taken from the pockets of workers. Le Pen and her followers propose to scrape even further at the bottom of the barrel, attacking foreigners. Our programme aims to find money where it’s in no short supply: directly in the bank accounts of billionaires. That’s what our ambitious tax proposal is all about. We want to tax corporate super-profits and reintroduce a wealth tax, strengthened with an environmental component,” said Clémence Guetté, one of the movement's MPs. We’re here, who’s like us.
With the Irish electorate trudging towards an endorsement of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and right wing independents at our next general election – the authors of this state – this is the kind of aggression, directed upwards, the Irish left should adopt.
If the result of our local elections was a victory for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – and maybe it was, fewer seats regardless – it was a victory rendered as being delivered by public disquiet about immigration. This suits both parties, as well as their proxies across the media, academia and business circles, because it both shifts the blame for their failures and hamstrings challenges to their power.
Karl Marx, in an 1870 letter, wrote of the conflict between English and Irish workers in British factories, where, “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.” To consider the Irish worker as a competitor was a mistake for the English worker, wrote Marx, because this only served the class who ruled over both alike. “In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself,” he wrote.
And this was something the country’s ruling class was well aware of. “This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this,” wrote Marx.
And so it goes here in Ireland: where our state broadcaster and foreign-owned media have embraced immigration polling questions that deliver the answers to encourage a particular rage; where ruling class parties – as well as some of their opposition – compete with each other on anti-immigration rhetoric. Whatever the motives of individual participants in this game, the structural result is the division of working people.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, as they’re popularly called, but rather a literal conspiracy: a group of people acting in concert to see that their common interests are pursued. It happens. On the left we call them unions.
It’s given us a country where Paul Gallagher, the Fianna Fáil-appointed attorney general with €8.5 million of property to call his own, will advise government – which will in turn listen – to distrust the motives of people in Donegal, that most forgotten of counties, whose houses are falling down around them. It’s a country where one of our public hospitals will facilitate cash-only, private appointments for the surgeon at the centre of Temple Street’s ongoing scandal, while those who can’t afford it simply wait. It’s a country where a caricature of provincial capitalism, Robert Troy, can spend his career in public service amassing a property portfolio most his constituents could only consider absurd, forget to declare it and be given the full support of his party after some penance on the backbenches.
This is how it’s supposed to be
None of these are anomalous. This is the state working as intended. The class of people who set these intentions in motion just don’t like to talk about it. “Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority, so the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remains amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime,” wrote theorist Georg Lukács, for whom this class’s “cynicism” is its defining feature, which “lives on in the world-historical irrelevances and nullities of its own existence” while the class “concerns itself only with the defence of that existence and with its own naked self-interest”.
Who’d have thought the Irish centre could move the way it has – as the Irish Times and Currency say – the way it continues to do, to encourage the further division of its subjects.
It’s easy, even righteous, to be angry. Maybe it’s better to be indignant. US presidential candidate Cornel West said, “If you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice. That's why Jesus goes into the temple and runs after marketeers when he first enters Jerusalem, right?” For West, what drove Jesus was “this unbelievable righteous indignation” rather than anger because, “Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven – it's ethically driven.” Denzel Washington’s Jake Shuttlesworth in He Got Game similarly advised his son, also called Jesus, “Let me tell you something, son, you get that hatred out your heart,” warning him he’ll end up just like his defeated father if he fails to do so.
Who will articulate that anger or indignation? And at whom?
