Culture wars in western world a mirror image of those up North
DURING this past week, when we were reminded of so many images of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a feeling of familiarity took hold.
With America and Britain now fighting their own culture wars, you could form the impression that the more the North tries to resemble the rest of the western world, the more the rest of the western world is trying to resemble the North.
We have been here for a long time on this island, we know how it works — MAGA against the Libs; the Brexiters against the Remainers... it’s like our ‘two traditions’ all over again.
We are in the tribal realm here, a culture war in which everybody is on the alert for the manifestations of the badness of the Other Side — in America and Britain now, it’s like Rangers and Celtic in an Old Firm derby around 1975. In fact it’s still like that in the North at times, it’s just that they got there first.
‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’ didn’t need any ‘dog-whistles’ when they had such raucous forms of selfexpression, but they enjoy the game in all its forms: all those controversial statues, all those institutions named after the wrong people, all those flags and emblems.
When we see the
MAGA crowds waving the
Confederate flag, or the Brexiters ‘owning’ the Union Jack, we are reminded that our ‘two traditions’ have added a more nuanced approach over time.
They have moved beyond the Orange and the Green, beyond Rangers and
Celtic, to the flags of Israel and Palestine. As if there wasn’t enough scope for all that tribalism in their own country, they felt the need to expand into other territories.
Likewise there is almost no aspect of life in America or Britain that is exempt from these polarities, as even wearing a mask during a pandemic became a battleground in the culture war.
Taking the knee or not taking the knee for the
Star Spangled Banner is as potent a distinction as the one between going every year to the Ulster Final in Clones, or never going to a GAA match of any kind.
Defending a statue of Churchill in Westminster or wanting to tear it down marks you out as clearly as being called Samuel Carson or Séamus O’Shaughnessy.
It’s not enough for you to win, the Others have to lose.
The everlasting nature of these tribal energies can be seen in the way that bigotry experts have devoted themselves to figuring out which side Rory McIlroy originally came from, despite the man’s insistence that he belongs to no side except the one that hits the golf ball 330 yards straight down the middle.
It’s a bit like the forensic way in which Dominic Cummings might examine the very DNA of Tory cabinet members to detect any traces of Remainer blood, or the way that Trump is constantly sniffing for signs of liberal tendencies in those around him, like a demented attack dog.
The North has been through a form of Trumpism itself, when you consider these lines by his repentant biographer Tony Schwartz: “Trump keeps coming at you, relentlessly, armed with a fabricated reality and absolute certainty, and eventually he sucks people into his cult because it’s easier than constantly resisting.”
Schwartz could have taken that statement and applied it directly to various Northern paramilitary leaders, with the IRA ones being the best, the most Trump-like in their creation of a “fabricated reality”.
For years it was the only reality that we knew, coming from them.
It was not necessarily down to some pathological dishonesty on their part, there was also a strategic element to these lies that everyone knew to be lies
— a kind of defiance of the normal rules of engagement with a State they didn’t recognise.
For them there was a war going on, and any abstract notion of ‘truth’ was immaterial, just as it has become for some of the leaders in the culture wars being waged today in the biggest theatres.
So when we recall how a Provo leader would tell you he has never been in the IRA, we are reminded of all the people that Trump says he doesn’t know, even though he has been pictured with them a hundred times. We are reminded of Boris Johnson coming at us relentlessly with lines about Brexit that everybody knows at that moment to be absolute bulls**t, just to get him to the end of another day.
The point is not to engage in any way with the concept of truth, it is just to make whatever noises will raise the spirits of the tribe and reassure them that he hates the same things that they hate.
Ah yes, we have been there, we surely have.
Last week we heard much about various individuals from America and Britain who had made a difference in our little culture war.
Maybe now we can give something back.
‘MAGA v the Libs; Brexiters v Remainers... it’s like our own “two traditions”’