A failed political project…

There’s been considerable discussion here and elsewhere about the fall of one prominent media/political figure this last weekend. But… perhaps, though, it is useful to pull back a little and consider the political project of which this was a part.

Because it is too much to credit to individuals all the woes of the world. But I can’t help but wonder about how a certain brand of politics and more pertinently, rhetoric, inflected, say the Workers’ Party. The WP, it is fair to say, was always going following the feuds of the 1970s to respond and react and reformulate its politics in certain ways. But the extremity of that, let alone the where matters ended up, was not, necessarily, inevitable – indeed looking at DL one could make the argument that they learned well, too well, from the lessons given and went further than their mentor. But that being the case then a political and rhetorical practice perhaps played quite some part in shaping that journey and the destination. The odd thing is how relatively low profile this was in the 1980s, at least at first, and in terms of more broadly it was only in the early to mid 1990s when public media personae took real shape. So what of the political project?

Given that political project was clearly never centred on the left or any particular political terrain except for certain periods of time that makes parsing out the meaning of it more difficult. But it is worth the effort I think because even if this was not exclusively of the left or right or centre, there was most certainly a political project there with definite goals.

And that rhetoric and political practice seems to have jumped the tracks into other organisations too.

Read accounts of the 1980s and it is clear that RTÉ was a cauldron of barely suppressed rage and animosities. Before we get too teary-eyed this was not restricted to any one side, as it were, but I think given the track record in later years it is fair to say that the sheer vituperativeness was more rather than less characteristic of some.

Yet there’s another aspect to this which bears consideration and that is that in its own terms all this rhetoric – and the project it supported – has been an absolutely abject failure. The utter bile directed against Sinn Féin throughout the last half century has functioned in almost no way to circumscribe their support. At no point can one look at specific or even general events and say ‘yes, here there was an impact in halting the rise of SF’. And it’s not even as if the very clear changes within SF in relation to their orientation to armed struggle or political activity made any difference to the manner in which they were treated.

The hostility, which tilted into complete obsession, that was characteristic of the attacks made seemingly no distinction between a Sinn Féin that was supportive of armed struggle or one that eschewed it and moved to a purely constitutional position. There was no encouragement of such moves – despite the provenance of many of those who were part of the project and their own political history, merely at best a sullen suspicion and more usually an outright disbelief which time and again was proven to be incorrect. That too was a part of the track record of failure – the statements of absolute certainty that PIRA was never going to ceasefire, was never going to abandon armed struggle, that SF was never going to accept policing, never going to enter power sharing, never going to maintain the institutions of the GFA/BA. At every single point SF did that and more. To no avail – few seemed willing to say the emperors had no clothes, and demonstrably was naked on every public outing, of which there were far far too many. Certainly the ahistoricity of the project, the indifference to the reasons for the eruption of violence in the North or how that was sustained – or as importantly how it came to an end, is striking – but was little if ever critiqued by the media or many in politics.

But there was another aspect of this. If the project never worked as intended, it is arguable that it had a chilling effect upon the early development of SF’s move away from armed struggle or perhaps more accurately the response to same, transforming what should have sensible and measured caution on the part of the broader polity to pools of outright hostility to or disbelief at the idea of PIRA cease-firing, etc. The mid-1990s saw a situation develop where it is just about possible the process could have fallen asunder completely. So there were impacts in terms of how matters developed.

And for those on the left who are sympathetic to but also willing to critique and be critical of Sinn Féin there was a sense of how that project hugely missed the point – that in fact this sort of broad based attack missed as much as it hit and functioned politically almost as a diversionary tactic.

Some might call that a bad faith approach on many sides, but particularly on the part of those championing the project. But I think it speaks of something else too. And that links in with the issue of failure. Because reading the most recent manifestation of the project’s social media arm briefly before it was consigned to history what was clear was that the account took an explicitly neo-unionist line, albeit a unionism that was limited to Northern Ireland (though on a couple of tweets even that seemed a bit blurry). Which leads to the thought that really, as someone put it to me this weekend, this was about antagonism to Northern nationalists and the expression of nationalism (telling how the SDLP continually got it in the neck rhetorically on the twitter accounts).

Yet, notably, this wasn’t quite what was expressed in more mainstream media vehicles used by those supporting the project. And therein lies another aspect of the problem. For all the talk about being barred from platforms in reality the actual beliefs were shaded, kept back presumably due to a realisation that overt neo-Ulster Unionism is not actually terribly popular in this state, and becoming less so on this island. That too could be called a form of bad faith. Many of us will have considerable respect for those who believe and support the Union – that is an entirely legitimate position, even if it is not one that some of us will hold. But there’s a real problem with people who conceal that belief, or any belief, for the sake of what appears to be expedience (and here it’s worth noting that an anonymous consistent coherent identity is not the same as a fake identity online. But if one has a public national platform the need for the former is very much open to question and there’s clearly no need for the latter).

And consider this, given the sheer isolation of the dominant forces in unionism at this point that too suggests a remarkable track record of failure. To identify with and attach a project so strongly to political forces that are conservative shading to reactionary (and just to be clear that is not true of all unionism or loyalism, some of which have progressive strands which the focus on the large battalions has in no small part tended to crowd out and marginalise) is quite some feat.

How does one take in a political class in a state, and perhaps on an island, when those taking them in have demonstrated a clear inability to succeed at stated goals? Time and again the record is one of failure. Failure of the WP, failure of the efforts to staunch the rise of SF, failure to make any difference to the downward trajectory of the UUP, failure to influence public opinion. But perhaps that’s beside the point – perhaps the point was never the outcomes but the perpetual outraged activity – after all, what sort of a world is it if the ‘problems’ were fixed and there was no reason to call on the wisdom of the ages, when constant chaos, continual alarmism, a world where extremism is always a vote away or a thought away or whatever SF is doing at the moment – to offer to those who will listen uncritically, to ensure that the overly credulous will echo the pronouncements made from on high. And perhaps that too tells us something, that if the means to keep the project in the public eye was to focus on SF and that in part became in essence the nature of the project – to keep in the public eye, well then in that respect it didn’t fail at all, at least in that limited context. But then this stops being a political project entirely and becomes something else again.

Which points to the crankish aspect to all this, a sort of performative fulminating which were the issues around it not so serious would likely be taken much less seriously in any other given context. That it wound up as the crankishness of an ageing cohort who seemed unable and unwilling to move beyond the nostrums of their earlier years, let alone to accept that the world might have changed and moved on around them is in its own way rather tragic. But it is difficult to have much sympathy when what the end result is is essentially trolling a state, and an island and the respective polities, and indeed the people inside those polities, writ large. And having had some small glancing direct personal experience of this trolling and how the media that in part enabled this was entirely indifferent to fact or accuracy or any means of redress – well then sympathy becomes an abstraction.