Irish Politics

Posted on February 25, 2007
Filed Under What's New, For Argument's Sake |

When I think about politics it tends not to have a nationality. I guess a lot of baby boomers are like me. Politics was a set of ideas that evolved through a debating process that was mysteriously global in an era when we only had books to use as transmitters. No internet, no IM, no blogs, just books. And books that took their writers sometimes years to conceive.

In those far off days (thirty years ago) I read a book about hegemony, the idea that any ruling elite will try, and usually succeed, to have its viewpoints permeate every aspect of society and at the same time make those views appear legitimate and somehow natural, the first concepts that people identify with.

In Ireland’s case that might be naturally Catholic, a willing and necessary obeisance to rural traditions allied to a new innovative dynamic in the high tech industrial sectors, all governed by the principals that the founding fathers toiled for. Slight pause for indigestion. It’s not much different from that of the USA. Just add in frontiersman and substitute Baptist, Protestant or Mormon depending on where you live.

First dips in these old fashioned books were like the proverbial lifting of a veil. They were uncannily revealing. I doubt much is being said these days that has a similar emotional impact as that moment when you realise how power works through ideas. Of course it works in other ways but this is as power-of-ideas post.

Similarly reading the historian Eric Hobsbawn tell of his own revelation when he read that history really moves through the interaction of different classes or groups competing for control over the productive forces that supply us with food, shelter, cars, restaurants and Gucci handbags. It was another revelation. The history I grew up reading was full of personalities whom the historians held up as prime movers in the inexorable progress of humanity to where it is today (Fianna Fail, Tory - yes Blairite Tories - Republican party dominated, take your pick).

In election year I miss these old arguments. Fianna Fail are undoubtedly going to win the election. The testing issue might be How. How on earth? But put that question to one side it will happen. I suspect it will happen because the strength of any possible opposition is dissipated. But also because we don’t look behind the ideas that we now use to explain society to ourselves. We don’t lift the veil.

The beauty of a maturing democracy is that people have plenty of disparate interests from cooking to gardening to bars and holidays and of course Gucci handbags. The downside is we don’t examine concepts like hegemony any more. They are outdated and associated with old fashioned conflict politics (Marxism versus capitalism) but they also had unique value.

Explain to me how FF will get back into power without thinking of hegemony, even if you don’t use the word?

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