r e a l r e v i e w . i e

I write this after the the Sunday Times ran article about Eamon Gilmore, entitled “Mr Popular or Mr Populist”, and perfectly fine it is too; it’s a fairly balanced portrait, even if it doesn’t focus on the most worrying thing about Gilmore – namely, that he looks like a garden gnome that’s lost his hat*. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, though, is the choice of title;  the main  accusation is that Labour are a touch light in some policy areas, but this is translated as “populist”.

I hate the word populist. Not because it carries with it the implication that people are stupid, and that the political elite only refuse to manipulate them out of a generous sense of altruism, although that’s reason enough; I hate it because it’s almost always misused. It effectively means “telling people what they want to hear”, but most people want to hear the truth, which is the one thing you never get from “populist” politicians. This mindset leads to a situation where you have Populism on one side, and Hard Decisions on the other, which is… oh look, here we are.

However, the meme of Hard Decisions is every bit as devious as anything that any politician has come up with. You can see this clearly by glancing towards the UK. The Tories are happily talking about how they’ll make difficult decisions, but in fact, they’ve carefully manipulated themselves into a position where these decisions will do them the least possible damage. They floated their proposed cuts when they were light-years ahead of Labour in the polls, and were comparatively safe to do so; it was simply an exercise in dampening expectations. Now, they’re cutting early – at a time when Labour’s refusal to cut has been shown to be working – because it puts them in a no-lose situation; if it doesn’t damage the recovery it’s worked, if it does they can blame it on Labour.

Over here, the government’s programme of Difficult Decisions has worked in more or less the same way**. They were in a position where whatever they did would be unpopular, so they chose an approach that would target the sort of people who don’t vote Fianna Fáil anyway. Fianna Fáil steered blatantly clear of touching any of its most sacred cows; most notably it introduced income levies instead of increasing Income Tax, so that it could spin the line that “we’re all in this together”, to minimise alienation of its core electorate (middle class right-wing types who constantly complain about being overtaxed, even though they patently weren’t). The minute any of its voters got annoyed – that’ll be the pensioners, the terrifying actually-going-and-voting demographic – they backed down quicker than Sarah Ferguson accepting ten grand.

In other words, difficult decisions are every bit as “populist” as the alternative; they’ve been selected to vicitimise a  demographic who largely don’t vote, certainly don’t vote for Fianna Fáil or the Green Party, and – this is probably the most important part of the equation – aren’t the sort of people who high-powered politicians ever really have to deal with. The Sunday Independent and its ilk can happily parrot “share the pain”, because – as far as the upper echelons of an institution like the Sindo are concerned – these people don’t really exist anyway. Middle- or upper-income pensioners, on the other hand, are familiar to the Sindo’s powers-that be – they know them, or in many cases, they are them. “Pain” only becomes “injustice” when it’s inflicted on people instead of demographics.

Designing your political policies around people you happen to know isn’t how you might instinctively visualise corruption, but it’s the most endemic form of corruption there is. We’re too quick to ascribe “corruption” to scheming behind-the-scenes behaviour, yet what really burns is its sheer banality. This excellent TASC report on Ireland’s Golden Circle (go on, at least read the summary) perfectly displays how small the ruling class is; if power is vested in a bunch of fine-living, affluent men who have a series of expensive dinners with each other and throw transparent compliments into each others’ fat faces, then as far as they’re concerned, the rest of the world simply stops existing. The shocking thing about our leaders’ ongoing refusal to tax the wealthy is that it literally doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone as a course of action; the only discussion of the subject has been token, dismissed with one-line statements that show no signs of having been thought through (“we need business”, “the wealth will leave the country”, “it won’t raise significant revenue” – you know the drill). The ruling classes are so firmly absorbed by Ireland’s golden circle that they barely notice it exists.

And so, when we ask the question “why is no-one angry?”, – it’s a recurring question in some sectors these days, not least because it makes people think of Network, and everyone likes thinking of Network – it’s because our anger serves no purpose. Calling for the government’s head is white noise. People are angry, but we aren’t people, we’re “People” – disembodied slogans of fury that don’t understand the realities of government, a morass that the government must try and appease with meaningless concessions.

That, right there, is the real nastiness of populism.

The mistake is in thinking that this attitude is rooted in anything other than a government being thoroughly impotent. The pensions scandal was a perfect example of how little power Cowen and his cronies now exert – Cowen’s protestations that he couldn’t legally compel people to give up their pensions was an attempt to disguise the obvious fact that he was no longer in control of his party. No-one suggested there was a legal compulsion, the real story was that Cowen couldn’t use the party whip to get ex-ministers to give up their pensions – he was too terrified of triggering rebellion to do so. When people march towards the Dáil calling for a change of government, and even the national press start to question the legitimacy of government, ignoring these voices isn’t symptomatic of arrogance so much as it is of fear and desperation, like a kid reacting to being told off by sticking his fingers in his ears and repeatedly shouting “rhubarb.”

The converse example of this is probably the rushed legislation about Head Shops***. This was pandering to conservative hysteria was generally described as “cynical”, but more than that, it was desperate; the actions of a group that would grab any chance to be popular, without any regard to how transparently needy it made them seem. It fooled no-one. Similarly, Eamon Ryan’s recent chit-chat about taking the Heineken Cup matches off of Sky and back onto normal telly where they belong was about as well-received as Shirley Temple Bar at an Orange Lodge march; it was perceived for exactly what it was, a nakedly pathetic attempt to be liked. These aren’t the actions of cynical schemers, but of a boring party-guest who laughs hysterically at everything because he’s got no friends.

Ultimately, when you’ve got a government who are so obviously no longer in control, getting angry isn’t as appropriate a response as just pointing and laughing, and their “populist” decisions tend to be the funniest. Some say economic hardship isn’t an appropriate thing to laugh about, but bullies don’t mind being hated; what they can’t stand is being treated as an irrelevance. An irrelevance is now precisely what these emasculated types in power are, and how we should treat them. They stagger from crisis to crisis, reaching for facile legislation that they hope will be popular with the people they don’t understand, and react to the economy by legislating around the whims of the formerly wealthy to whom they’re so enthralled. Laughter and ridicule are among the most powerful weapons we have.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.