Sir, – A very thought-provoking article by Finn McRedmond in relation to the recent US elections (“Ireland needs its own Joe Rogan, someone to question liberal orthodoxies”, Opinion & Analysis, November 14th).
What we have witnessed in our own March 8th referendums on the Constitution, in the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, and in the more recent US elections, is that admonishing the oft-described unenlightened merely serves to make the liberal viewpoint look illiberal.
Furthermore, it is this group of delegitimised voters that are increasingly becoming the silent “undecided” when inaccurate and unreliable opinion polls are circulated.
Feeling rebuffed and unheard will be the bus that drives many of these voters to the ballot box, rather than a dogmatic belief in conservative orthodoxy. Far-right politics gets this point and in so doing becomes the fertile ground for the seeds of many silenced sentiments.
While ripping up the rule book may be self-serving for many commentators such as Rogan, the societal implications are often less considered in a world of soundbites, yet voted for by the alienated middle-ground. – Yours, etc,
THEO RYAN,
Wicklow.
Sir, – It comes as no surprise that Finn McRedmond’s solution to a problem largely of her own concoction is an Irish Joe Rogan, since her characterisation of the “woes” befalling Ireland are a thinly veiled copy of the rhetoric of Rogan and others that bear responsibility for the polarisation and dumbing down of American public discourse.
Your columnist would do well to try, even just once, an alternative lens to the culture war prism through which she views every issue. Failure to do so results in a simplistic analysis of both the US presidential elections and Ireland’s rejection of the referendums on the definitions of the family and women’s duties in the home.
On the first point, the idea that Democrats lost the election due to their being hostage to wokeness is easily dismantled. In the past year alone, the Biden administration has funded Israel’s war crimes to the tune of billions of dollars, Kamala Harris boasted of owning a handgun in TV interviews, and many Democratic congressional candidates campaigned on the basis of their ability to severely limit migration into the US. Not exactly a party drunk on progressivism.
It is much more realistic to say that it was the perception of the party being unbearably woke that led to its downfall, and almost nobody bears more responsibility for this than the bloviating and obfuscating Rogan.
On the second point, a wide variety of reasons informed Irish voters’ decisions in March.
Far from a rejection of wokeness, the failure of the referendum relating to care in the home was more down to public sentiment that the proposed amendment did not go far enough in its recognition of the role of family carers.
Not exactly a repudiation of an ever more progressive land.
Even if one were to grant that Ireland’s political elite live in a progressive bubble disconnected from the public – hardly an accusation regularly levelled at Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – the idea that the solution to this is more “critical” voices like Joe Rogan is utterly misguided. A man worth hundreds of millions with pitiful epistemic standards does not hold a candle to truly critical voices like Vincent Browne, Catherine Corless, Fintan O’Toole and many others that have queried orthodoxy for the public good. – Is mise,
JOHN HOGAN,
Assistant Professor of International Relations,
Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam,
The Netherlands.