Republicans Only In Name:
Posted by Jim on October 22, 2018
Susan Collins, Brett Kavanaugh and Irish-Americans On the Right
Monday, October 22, 2018
In the aftermath of the appointment of the decadent Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS, Michael Shaw Mahoney discusses ultra conservative Irish America.
Susan Collins has difficulty speaking. The Republican senator from Maine suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that dams her flow and gives her oratory a broken, halting quality. Susan Collins does not have the gift of the gab, but the senator cannot help it.
The senator does have control over the content of her comments, however, and earlier this month, on the day before the US Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she was quite clear about her allegiances. There’s no mistaking her loyalty to white men who want to control women’s reproductive rights. Collins is also a dedicated apologist for powerful men accused of sexually assaulting women. There’s little doubt that some of these men are guilty as charged. How did the tag Republican get affixed to these Americans, and how did Susan Collins, the descendent of an Irish immigrant to New England in the early 19th century, become their defender? She and the Grand Old Party (GOP) have certainly drifted many, many miles from the cabin door of Abraham Lincoln.
We Americans are taught at an early age that Honest Abe grew up in a little cabin and read the family Bible by candlelight. It’s an old yarn, and it’s true. The Lincoln family lived on two hardscrabble farms in LaRue County, Kentucky, right smack in the middle of the state, and the family Bible still exists. A massive thing with butternut pages, it rests in a glass case a stone’s throw from where baby Abraham was likely born. The Great Emancipator’s humble origins, his rise from rural poverty to the leadership of the fight against bondage and oppression, made him a likely candidate for adulation among the thousands of Irish who survived the coffin ships crammed with the refugees of the potato blight. Lincoln’s ascendency to the White House coincided with the rough assimilation of Ireland’s cottier class to the dog-eat-dog world of America’s teeming eastern cities, to Boston and New York in particular. Battered by hunger and indifference, those bereft of the lumper landed in a ring of competition and carnality. For some Lincoln must have been a sympathetic figure. But not for all.
In 1863 after Lincoln introduced a draft to augment the Union armies during the American Civil War, many recent Irish arrivals to New York City protested. They were none too keen on getting shot for the rights of the black man. Not long off the coffin ships, these incorrigible Irish rowdies, many of whom spoke English as a second language, burned and looted a good chunk of Manhattan. They also turned on the city’s blacks, hanging some of their victims from lampposts, setting fire to others. In the mayhem, the indigent survivors of an agricultural disaster gave the lynch mob its muscle, and in their powerlessness to combat being used as cannon fodder by a nation they hardly knew, the crazed Irish had to find someone lesser, someone to serve as a scapegoat. Lincoln be damned, they must have thought, emancipation be damned.
The Irish immigrant ancestor of Susan Collins did not come over during the Famine. Arriving in the 1820s, he set up shop in Maine, well away from urban squalor, and began a sawmill, the prototype for a company still run by members of the Collins family. We don’t know what that ancestor thought about the race question in America. However, a conservative, entrepreneurial streak soon began to take hold in the Collins family. Its patriarchs bought into the American Dream, the Horatio Alger rags to riches trope that, one must admit, the Collins clan brought to fruition. They stocked away enough acorns to keep them from the chill and vulnerability of an Irish life lived in America’s ghettoes where Paddy, Mick, and Mary struggled to be white and stay one broken rung above blacks, where they watched the arrival of other tribes, the Italians and eastern Europeans who came from lands that Donald Trump, if he lived then, would dismiss as “shithole countries”. The family of Susan Collins had a buffer and built a tidy fortress.
Which brings us to the curious case of one Brett Kavanaugh, America’s little darling. Through some twist of fate, the newest member of the United States Supreme Court shares a surname with one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets. They have little in common. Poets do not generally weep nostalgically about their high school workouts with their kegger buds, in Brett’s case the charming Tobin and Squee who, after four years of towel snapping and Delaware beach bacchanalia, became alums of the Jesuit institution Georgetown Prep and a school girl named Renate, the earth girl they claim was easy.
Brett Kavanaugh failed his job interview in front of an entire nation, but thanks in large part to the vote of Susan Collins, he now holds down one of nine seats on the Supreme Court. Collins was not swayed by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault, nor was she nudged to a NO vote by the implorations of numerous law professors and the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Brett Kavanaugh belongs to a special species of Irish-America. He’s a member of an acquisitive breed of bourgeois Roman Catholics expert in the art of shape shifting to become, at least on the surface, super WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (i.e. untouchable white dudes with lots of power).
Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Georgetown Prep, is not an elite American prep school, like say Andover, Groton, or even Woodberry Forest in Virginia, where Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) learned some of his chops before returning to El Paso and the border along the Rio Grande. No, Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school. It’s a Roman Catholic high school dedicated to athletics; unlike Belvedere in Dublin, which can claim James Joyce, Georgetown Prep is second division. For Americans who tuned it, the school now has a reputation for producing fit beer drinkers and professional date rapers. Bret Kavanaugh also went to Yale – he’s quite proud of that apparently – but he could never have become a member of Skull & Bones, the secret society at Yale that looks like the tomb of Roman patricians and can claim Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger as members. Skull & Bones is a WASP nest.
The desire for power and respectability has shaped many so-called Irish-Americans, a group with many subsets and a group more accurately dubbed Americans with Irish surnames. There’s Irish by DNA, Irish by passport, and Irish by imagination or fantasy. Choose your definition. Depicted as violent simians in Victorian cartoons, Irish immigrants to America in the 19th century, as noted previously, had to stomp on blacks and other immigrants to become more fully white and American. While the Roman Catholic Church certainly shoved conservative family values down the throats of Irish immigrants and still exerts a disproportionate influence given the Roe vs. Wade debate, social class in a supposedly classless society became the greasy plane upon which some Irish slid to the right. An old friend Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, a graduate of Yale University and Georgetown Law School, recently wrote:
The transformation from Irish to Irish-American fascinates me too, especially because I have so much feeling for the former and so little for the latter. I’m far less inclined to lay the blame (for right wing conservatism) at the steps of the American Roman Catholic Church – not least because it’s hard to best the 20th century Irish Church for conservative strictures. The example of Italian-Americans overlaps with that of Irish-Americans to an extent that suggests an alternate, and to me more likely, pair of explanations: the logic of American racism combined with that of American anti-Catholicism, creating an endless desire in both groups to differentiate themselves from an abjected black American underclass and to strive for complete access to and acceptance by wealthy WASP power – see the WASP-emulation of places like Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep. Where that Roman Catholic Irish-American insecurity is most acute, the striving for white power is most conspicuous and craven. Fox News, with its cast of swollen talking heads, has made the reputations of several now prominent Irish-Americans. Bill O’Reilly, forced to leave the network under a cloud of sexual harassment charges, became the trusted talisman of millions on the right wing. O’Reilly has always promoted the idea of American exceptionalism, reaping the profits from quickly cobbled biographies of white men leading the way in America’s manifest destiny. Bill O’Reilly is the descendent of a potato farmer from County Cavan who fled Ireland early in the lumper blight.
Another Fox star, Sean Hannity, grew up on Long Island and likes to point out that his Irish grandparents from counties Cork and Down were humble, hardworking folk who earned everything they had. Hannity is now the minister of propaganda for Donald Trump. Joseph Goebbels never did the job so well. The vast majority of GOP voters, the ones Hillary Clinton infamously dubbed “deplorables” in the 2016 presidential election, see O’Reilly and Hannity as the great white hope. They have no awareness that these right wing chest thumpers with Irish surnames descended from Irish men and women who suffered endless abuse, who in some cases were even murdered. In 1855, a Know-Nothing mob in Louisville, Kentucky set fire to tenements occupied by Irish and German immigrants, killing 26 people on a tragic day now known as Bloody Monday. That stain on the Nativist movement of the 19th century was a precursor to Charlottesville, though on Bloody Monday the hate was primarily directed at Irish canal diggers in particular and Roman Catholics in general.
The painful history of Irish second-class citizenship has faded. The vilified immigrant has become the demagogue who now scapegoats more recent arrivals. O’Reilly, Hannity, Steve Bannon of Breitbart, and yes Brett Kavanaugh too, have joined the motorcade of shiny golf carts. They have entered the inner sanctums of cigar smoke: fully white, fully protected, fully committed to holding the fort against the brown barbarian hordes.
The American political parties, it must be stressed, made an ideological flip in the 20th century. The Republican Party of Lincoln slowly morphed into a reactionary party of social conservatives friendly to the interests of the wealthy while the Democratic Party, formerly so entrenched in the South, moved away from its support of segregation and Jim Crow. The parties would be unrecognizable to their supporters of a century ago. The GOP of Susan Collins, a political party now kidnapped by Donald Trump, has little in common with the republicanism of those who fought against Franco and fascism in Spain. Nor does it resemble the “good old IRA” that confronted the British Empire in the era of Ireland’s War of Independence. Trump supporters of the ‘Merican variety would undoubtedly brand James Connolly a commie libtard. Michael Collins feared the wealth gap that Republicans in the United States ignore or openly work to widen. Collins wrote in 1922, “What we must aim at is the building of a sound economic life in which discrepancies cannot occur. We must not have destitution or poverty at one end, and at the other an excess of riches.” Michael Collins was opposed to hacienda economics. Admittedly, the American GOP does share – at least until recently – the social conservatism of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil, an Irishman and party also known to wear the republican scarf in all kinds of intricate knots. The historian R. L. Foster writes in his seminal book Modern Ireland: 1600-1972:
But ‘Republican’ could stand for anything from merely anti-British to agrarian-syndicalist-revolutionary, not to mention exclusivist-Gaelic-Catholic; it was a moral stance as much as a political affiliation. The dust from the Kavanaugh hearings has settled. The boy-man who loves his calendars and beer is a Supreme Court justice. He works with Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. Some decisions have an impact the sages, prophets, and lesser prognosticators, like the dogs in the street, can foresee at the time. When Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith returned from London, having given away a sizeable chunk of their island, many Irish instinctively knew there would be hell to pay and more war to wage. They were right of course. Susan Collins (no relation to the Big Fella except maybe in the distant mists) also made a momentous decision; in the end, nobody was really surprised by her Yes vote for Kavanaugh. She nailed her colors to the mast for all to see. She let the boys bust out the rum and flog the blackguard who decries the captain suffering from sunstroke. Collins has let the boys flog the women too. Especially the women. We will have to wait and see how her party loyalty, her alliance with forces deaf to the cries of the Irish departed, affects the United States and the generations of Americans to come. In the meantime, the ropes are pulled tight around the wrists and the lash is raised on high.
➽ Michael Shaw Mahoney, (MA Queen’s University Belfast) is a teacher and father of two from Louisville, Kentucky.