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- [00:00]
A
Hey there, listeners. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's our first ever crossover podcast. I spoke with Hugh Linehan of the Inside Politics podcast at the Irish Times. While I was in Dublin about a week and a half ago, I was in town for a wedding and we figured we'd sit down at the Irish Times studios and ask each other some friendly but challenging questions about our respective countries. That's what you're about to hear. So if you've just learned about GD Politics from hearing this episode in the Inside Politics Feedback, welcome. Stay a while. You can expect a lot more analysis of our topsy turvy American politics in this feed in the coming weeks and months. And if you're a regular listener but want to know more about Ireland, Inside Politics has got you covered. All right, here's the crossover.
- [00:47]
B
I should say after we were speaking, I was thinking, I don't know why I suggested it being like a tennis match. I fucking hate tennis and I've always been terrible at it. So if it's a tennis match, it's more like, you know, those matches you play with very slow children who you just lobb gently over the net at each other or something.
- [01:04]
A
There we go. Well, that's a great metaphor because I did play tennis in high school but was very bad at it.
- [01:11]
B
Okay, so there's two of us always
- [01:13]
A
falling below the second doubles cut off to actually play in any of the matches.
- [01:17]
B
That's a relief. I'm kind of monocular. I really only have one properly working eye, which means no depth of field at all. So that was always my excuse for why I could never hit the bloody thing. Jalen Duke, you are extremely welcome to the podcast.
- [01:39]
A
Thank you so much for having me, Hugh. And also, Hugh, welcome to the GD Politics podcast. This is our first official crossover. Usually when I'm traveling abroad, I try to talk to some experts while I'm there, but I reached out to you and I was like, let's do a proper crossover.
- [01:55]
B
So it's kind of exciting. It's also slightly scary. I'm not sure how it's going to go.
- [01:59]
A
It is a little bit scary. And if it doesn't work out, I have some names to name. In terms of who we have to blame, I asked my Irish friends in New York City, Alex Owens and Conor o' Mara actually just got married, so they're the reason I'm here in Ireland. I asked them, along with Nal Dennehy and Mark Stokes, who should I talk to when I'm in Ireland. And to a person, they said you. They said, hugh Linehan has the best politics podcast in Ireland. So that's why I'm here.
- [02:25]
B
Oh, my God. So congratulations to them on their. On their wedding. They. They had beautiful weather for it. It's been glorious for your week in Ireland.
- [02:31]
A
I've been joking about Club Med Ireland. I mean, I have been gaslit for the past however many years that Ireland does nothing but rain. And I don't think I've seen a single drop of rain the entire time I've been here. We were in Kerry county, on the beaches. It was, I don't know, for American listeners, 75 degrees and above. It was almost too hot to go hiking.
- [02:51]
B
I should warn you, American listeners, that that's. That's a bad use of data if they take it into account in planning a trip to Ireland. Always pack a raincoat and an umbrella and, you know, and other kinds of rainwear as well. But I should say that I was listening to you for years on the FiveThirtyEight podcast, which I know some of our listeners will be familiar with. Irish people get very immersed in American politics, and 538 was a real go to place for a really long time.
- [03:17]
A
Yeah, for a lot of Americans, too, unfortunately. I'm sure you've heard that not only have we been shut down, but our archives have recently left the Internet as
- [03:26]
B
well, which I should just say you probably are not in a position to say this, but that's a fucking disgrace.
- [03:32]
A
Yeah, no, it is a disgrace. I mean, we all worked really hard on that. And it feels shitty from a journalist perspective, but it's actually shittier from an educator's perspective. I heard from so many teachers in the States who used our material in their lesson planning. And so now you go to all of these different syllabi from universities and high schools and whatever, and the links are broken. They can't go see the gerrymandering project or different interactives we did about, you know, women in politics and gun deaths in America and all kinds of different things that educators used to link to. So I think that's the biggest loss.
- [04:10]
B
And of course, it's a real problem, isn't it, with new media in a way? Because in the old world, no matter how small the magazine you published or whatever it might be, it had to be lodged in Ireland, it had to be lodged with libraries here. And I think the same is true in the United States. So an archive was always kept, whereas this stuff can just be junked.
- [04:28]
A
Yeah, the assumption early on was something that ends up on the Internet, is on the Internet forever. And so maybe there wasn't the same kind of care given to archiving things that only exist in their physical version. Of course we have the Wayback Machine, so that is an incredible resource. A lot of the information is still accessible and there are hard drives amongst friends that have been passed around. But of course that's Disney IP, which is some of the most litigated IP in the world because 538 had been
- [04:57]
B
bought by ABC, which in turn is owned by Disney.
- [04:59]
A
Exactly. A weird sort of matryoshka doll of like media companies. 538 was sort of cropped up as the little guy who's poking the establishment in the eye and saying, you're not being so responsible in terms of how you're explaining elections. And it's a lot of vibes based elections analysis and sort of talking to the insiders and parroting back what the insiders are saying. And 538 grew up as a critique to that and then sort of was adopted by the establishment and then, I don't know, drowned in a bathtub by the establishment.
- [05:34]
B
And I should just say for our listeners that GD politics, if they haven't heard it, very much continues in that tradition, kind of based on the same principles in approaching political stories.
- [05:41]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I like to say my three pillars are curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. So we don't start from a dogmatic or ideological position. We start with questions. We try to be rigorous in terms of how we answer them. It could be polling, it could be social science research, and then a sense of humor. Because politics sucks. And so like, if we're not gonna have fun, what's the fucking point?
- [06:01]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely. So we talked in advance about how we were gonna do this, and we decided to do it in the form of a tennis match where we would lob shots at each other. We've just realized, talking before we started recording, that we both were both terrible at tennis. So we'll just have to see how that metaphor goes over the next while. But given that you're a guest in this house, I'm going to give you the opportunity to raise the first topic. Are they asking the first question?
- [06:21]
A
Yeah. So this one actually arises for me from listening to your podcast as I've been driving around Ireland over the past week. And it's a theme that comes up a lot, but maybe sometimes gets brushed past, which is why there isn't more of a populist right wing movement. In Ireland, as we have seen in other parts of the Anglophone world and other parts of Europe, we have the rise of Trump in the United States, Brexit in the uk, Marine Le Pen in France, the list goes on. And in Ireland, there's currently a centrist coalition government. And you try to query the Internet, what's the difference between Finnafal and Fine Gael? And from an American perspective, it's like, I really can't figure it out.
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B
Does it not just say none?
- [07:11]
A
It says, like, it really depends on which side of the war your great grandfather fought on, or something like that.
- [07:16]
B
That's basically it.
- [07:17]
A
Yeah. And so, I mean, the Irish political context is so different from the American or British or French political context. But it seems like a lot of journalists that you listen to keep searching for the start of a far right populist movement and not really finding it or suggesting that maybe pieces of it could be represented through Sinn Fein or, you know, of course there is independent Ireland, which, if you're really looking for it, that is where you find the. The right populist movement. But I'm curious, you know, that's incredibly small and not a very professional organization and doesn't have much of a presence in Parliament. I have a lot of thoughts about the American experience, but I'm curious what your thoughts are about why Ireland hasn't had a far right populist movement, which I don't even know if you need to say far right, you know, a strong populist movement in general.
- [08:08]
B
Exactly. Of the mold that we're familiar with and everything from Fratelli d' Italia to Vox in Spain to pretty much every European country. And I suppose that's the reason, first of all, why you probably heard in this podcast, you've heard various people saying, well, where is it? When does it arrive? They're not saying necessarily with any great enthusiasm, but it seems like a valid question because I think at this point you'd be pretty hard put to find any European country that doesn't have at least some element of that in its parliamentary politics that's got enough political trajectory to land up in Parliament with at least a few seats, and we're really not there yet. Even independent Ireland, which you mentioned, is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I'm even not quite sure where it'll end up ideologically. We'll see what happens. So the question, the number one question is, why is that the case? And the number two question is, is it going to change? Because for a long time, I think people thought that for Example, there was no significant far right party in countries like Spain and Portugal, but there are now Chega in Portugal as well. So it does seem to have arrived nearly everywhere. One thing that people point to a lot is the fact that we are unusual in that we have a left wing populist nationalist party in the form of Sinn Fein. And that party is very rooted in Irish history, in the conflict with the United Kingdom, in the more recent troubles in Northern Ireland, which went on for 30 years, grew up out of that relationship with the Republican Armed Force movement and the ira. And ever since the peace process and the end of the major conflict which happened now almost 30 years ago, Sinn Fein diverted to a political project and has had quite a lot of success. Of course, there's two jurisdictions in this island, there's Northern Ireland and there's the Republic, which we're in at the moment. And it is the largest party, or was the largest party on both sides of the border in terms of popular votes in 2020. It slipped back slightly south of the border since then. But elements of what Sinn Fein stand for, it's nationalist, it's very conscious of its Irishness and what it considers to be the national project. But it's also rooted in rural communities and working class communities. Its electoral support maps quite closely to what political scientists see as the key electoral support for right populist parties in other countries. So I think that's one of the reasons sin tayne was a sort of a sort of a blocking element. You could also maybe say something about Irish society and Irish history. We know that in the United States, whether it's in the Rust Belt or in places of the Red Wall in Northern England or Northern France, places across the world that used to be quite industrial were often quite left leaning in terms of how they voted, very heavily unionized. That the whole process of deindustrialization has led to a fairly deep form of alienation from establishment politics in those areas. And that's been a fertile ground for the populist right. Ireland has its serious social problems, and we're here in Dublin at the moment. You can go to parts of Dublin that are definitely deprived and marginalized in the same way those are, but they're not as big, partly because we didn't really have much of an industrial revolution, certainly in the Republic of Ireland. So some of those kind of social, underlying social factors are probably there as well. And then the last point I'd make is that Ireland was a very conservative country up until relatively recently. And people might be aware, you Know, it is extremely Catholic. Divorce was banned, abortion was illegal, contraception was illegal. It went through a process of quite rapid transformation from the 1990s onwards, both economically and socially. So the country's political trajectory is probably very different from a lot of those European countries and indeed from the United States, which have this post war story of, you know, increased prosperity through the 50s, liberalization in the 60s and 70s, the arrival of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 80s, and then there's a backlash against some of those things, particularly in the wake of the economic crash. We experience some of those things, but we experience them maybe in a different order and therefore our narrative is a bit different.
- [12:19]
A
Yeah. Reflecting on this myself, I think one of the main issues here is that Ireland doesn't really find itself in a period of decline right now.
- [12:29]
B
Sure.
- [12:30]
A
And in fact, it finds itself at the top of its game. You know, in many ways, it's never been more prosperous, There have never been more jobs. And so far from a sense of having lost something, Ireland feels at this moment like it's gained a whole lot. And of course, there are problems underneath that. You look at how wealthy Ireland is and you're looking at comparable countries like Luxembourg and Switzerland, and we can get into the details behind that. And it is a very interesting story of how Ireland finds itself in that position. But if we're going to tell a sort of both cultural, political and economic story, I think we start with, there aren't many places in Ireland that feel today like they're significantly worse off than they were two, three decades ago.
- [13:17]
B
That's true. So therefore, it's hard to make the argument that we need to make Ireland great again, because people ask, when was he again? And it's hard to point to when that is.
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A
Well, and there's a couple other things, too, which is you mentioned Trump's slogan. You know, I don't consume a ton of Irish media, but I'm savvy enough to know that about 75% of Irish people disapprove of the American president. And as an English speaking country, you're able to consume pretty much all the media that we produce in America. And so having an extremely unpopular right wing populist in America produces also a backlash effect in Ireland. I mean, I think we saw this in Canada and Australia after Trump took office a second time, which is that having having somebody do the thing in politics, we're wondering, why isn't there a right wing populist movement in Ireland? Well, there's already an extremely visible one in America. That Irish people have determined for themselves that they don't like.
- [14:13]
B
I think that's true. But it's also the case that, for example, in the United Kingdom, where Reform UK are doing pretty these days and are the largest party in every opinion polls, Trump is also extremely unpopular in the United Kingdom, including among Reform UK voters. And of course, Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK is very pally with Trump, and it's noticeable that he's been talking a lot less about that over the last few months. And similarly, across Europe, you see Georgia Maloney, for example, visibly distancing herself from Trump. And I think that's a direct reaction to the fact that he is also extremely unpopular there. So you're seeing the European populist rights start starting to decouple itself from Trump. But I think you raise an interesting question, which is what impact will the full four years of this Trump term with everything that involves, have on populist movements, including in Ireland, where they haven't even kind of taken off yet?
- [15:07]
A
I think, again, being able to consume American media is a distinguishing point, of course, not between the UK And Ireland, but between Ireland and some other European countries. And of course, to be in first place in the UK these days, you only need 20% support of the nation because the nation is so fractured amongst, you know, labor and the Tories and Lib Dems and they have a Broncos
- [15:31]
B
electoral system as well.
- [15:32]
A
Exactly. You know, the other important piece here is demographics. There's a lot of conversation today about the start of an influx of immigrants in Ireland. But when you look at the raw data, you're nowhere close to countries like the United States and the UK in terms of becoming a multicultural, multi ethnic society. I mean, if you look at the raw data in Ireland, it looks like America in the 1950s, which is approaching 90% white. Now, of course, there are immigrants from Europe who are in the UK who are also white. So that doesn't necessarily mean Irish, but it's approaching 80% when you just look at the white Irish population. Now, in the 1950s, America was about 90% white. We liberalized our immigration laws in the 1960s, and by today, it's slightly less than 60% of the country that's white. And so people. And we have a very different relationship to immigration in the United States than in Ireland.
- [16:33]
B
It's a country of country.
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A
It's a country of immigrants. You know, it's a country of many Irish immigrants. We have 500% of the Irish population in America that you have here in Ireland. I mean, I say that somewhat in just. But we have 30 million people in America who claim Irish ancestry, although I
- [16:47]
B
don't piss off any of them. But the fact is I, I, I query some of that, you know, I'm sure.
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A
Do you like Guinness? That means you're Irish.
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B
I'm sure your friends who recommended the podcast are definitively 100% Irish. But there are a lot of people who do, you know, who, who say they're Irish. I, I always think that we had a, we had a podcast about this a few months ago. We were discussing, you know, what does Irish American identity mean now in American politics? And we came to the conclusion that it really doesn't mean very much. It's a very light signifier for most people who, it's very easy. Often it strikes to me for some say you, you have a grandmother from somewhere in Eastern Europe that doesn't even have a name anymore, and somebody else who came from somewhere indistinguishable in a part of Germany. And then you have a grandfather who's Irish, and so therefore you are Irish. Joe Biden isn't remotely as Irish as he tried to make out.
- [17:35]
A
For example, I think you just read me to filth. If we're going to play that game. Half Eastern European Jew, and then the other half is a grandfather from somewhere in Germany. And then my grandmother who listens to the GD Politics podcast religiously, Martha Claire McNamara, who exaggerated. So you are really reading me to filth. But, you know, in terms of how societies evolve as they become more multicultural and more multiethnic and different areas of tension that political entrepreneurs can exploit in order to create a populist backlash, I mean, you just haven't opened yourselves up that much to that kind of potential yet. And I know that there's a lot of fear, and I think a lot of that fear right now or concern is adopted from other countries. Like, you see the American response to immigration, you see the British response to immigration, and you wonder, do we want that for ourselves? In fact, I did an interview with a political scientist in Japan not too long ago when I was traveling there for a couple weeks earlier in the.
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B
They're not too keen on immigration there.
- [18:41]
A
Not at all. And I mean, they're far more blunt about it than many Western nations, just for cultural reasons. I think they feel very comfortable saying, well, we're an island nation, we're Japanese, and we want to keep it that way. And, you know, I think a lot of people in Ireland might consider that racist or unacceptable or whatnot. And so there is a very dynamic conversation. And Ireland is deciding in this very moment, I think, in the process of deciding what it wants immigration to look like. And I think, you know, I oftentimes point to Denmark and Sweden as examples of, of the paths that a country can take in some ways, which is Sweden was a lot more liberal when it came to immigration. That prompted a backlash from the far right that is now part of the governing majority. And that backlash, you know, basically helped elevate right wing parties in Sweden. Denmark looked at that, you know, the left in Denmark looked at that and said, well, hell no, we're going to crack down on immigration. And the left still holds power in Denmark, but it is a much more restrictivist nation when it comes to immigration. And now I'm not saying that sort of the only key to stemming populism or that if you allow immigrants in your country by necessity there will be a right wing populist backlash. But there are many different ingredients that go into it that include an aspect of decline, an aspect of the culture is changing, something is lost, et cetera, an aspect of having a political entrepreneur who wants to go in and make hay of it or mine, the conflicts that are possible to be mined. And Ireland in this moment doesn't quite have a lot of those features, it looks like, to me, at least from the outside.
- [20:18]
B
No, every, I mean, in a way, every country has its own story of this. Obviously for some European countries, their history of immigration is tied up with their history of colonialism. And that's particularly true of Britain and France with these large communities of people who come from former colonies in Africa and Asia. And that brings its own kind of narrative and its own tensions. Whereas in the, the Nordic countries you're talking about, they didn't have that. Sweden had, I think, a very big part of its self conception as a liberal, social democratic country did very much open its borders more to asylum seekers from conflicts in other areas, like Yugoslavia, for example, in the 1990s than others did. And then you're quite right, they had a backlash to that position. And the Danes have done things differently. Ireland's story is quite unique in this regard because if you look at Ireland in the 1990s, it had half the people living there than were living there in the 1840s. In the 1840s, you had the great famine and a million people died. But in the decades, the centuries that followed, people kept leaving Ireland. It was a country of emigration, always a country of emigration. And I don't think there's any other European country whose population halved over that period from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th century. And then in the mid-90s, it started to turn and people started coming here.
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A
But.
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B
But I view with amusement sometimes attempts by populist right figures in other parts of the world, for example, Elon Musk, to point to Ireland's current demographics, which you correctly quoted there, as being a sign that, quote, Ireland is being overrun or Ireland is full. Because first of all, I mean, you did, and I'm not being critical here, but you conflated two different things there. You talked about immigration, you talked about
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A
race, which is, I guess, a very American mistake.
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B
There is a raw data number that says that almost 20% of people in Ireland now were not born in Ireland. And that is true. But many of them came in the waves of people who came first in the late 90s and the early noughties, most of whom arrived as a result of the expansion of the eu. So we have large communities from Poland, Lithuania, other parts of central and European Europe, and a lot of Brits, which complicated relationship nonetheless, if you want to call it, this ethnic minority in the Republic of Ireland, and that's without even getting into the politics of Northern Ireland, are British people who came here. I have at least two in laws. I have to say they've integrated very well. Their accents are a bit funny, they go to Marks and Spencer's a bit too much. But apart from that, we really do tolerate them. The story of Irish immigration has over the last 30 years, it is a remarkable turnaround. The population of the country has actually increased by, I think, almost 50% in the space of almost three decades, which is pretty remarkable, again by European standards. But it's a real mix of people. It's people from all over Europe, it's people from Britain, it's some Americans. I've met a few refugees from Trump's America here in the last 12 months or so.
- [23:17]
A
I mean, not to really touch a hot stove here, but your post war births peaked in the 2000 teens.
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B
Yes.
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A
That's also very unique for, you know, a European or Western nation, many of whom have been experiencing a sort of decline in birth rates since the 90s.
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B
We're on a similar demographic curve, but we're about 20 or 30 years behind, behind other people. And of course, remember, the thing with the thing with demographics is if you have a baby boom, as we did, I think, in the early 90s or thereabouts, you're going to get a second baby boom, even if it's not as, not quite as big when that generation that's born then millennials, baby children, all
- [23:55]
A
of that, all the problems they've wrought.
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B
Yeah, I know. They've ruined the world. They're so. Yes, there are communities here from Africa, from the Middle East. I think the highest number of people who are right now coming to Ireland are coming from India. And a lot of those are working in tech or in medicine. And I think they're pretty welcome in both those areas. That's not to say that there aren't racial tensions and they tend particularly to arise. And this is always the case, I think, in places which are in trouble anyway, that are economically marginalized or where people feel they've been left behind. But I think you're probably quite right. You're right. You know that for most people in Ireland, even though I'm reluctant to admit this because I'm an Irish journalist, so the first item on the agenda every morning is figure, you know, complain about something that's bad about Ireland. I think for most people, their lives are better than their parents lives were.
- [24:48]
A
Yeah. And I mean, I'm happy to talk about what's wrong with Ireland.
- [24:53]
B
Let's talk about what's wrong with America.
- [24:55]
A
Okay, well, I'm happy to do that too, as an American journalist. It's how I spend all, almost all of my time. But there's another piece too, which I'm a little mushier on because I'm not an expert on Irish policy. But it seems like even the center right slash center left parties, which I don't even think you could really call Finn Fallen Fine Gael, center right or center left necessarily, because there's so little policy difference sometimes between the two. Some of the policies are quite populist anyway, even though, you know, Irish politics are, yes, state and steady and small C, Conservative and the like. A lot of what they're fighting about is giving cash transfers to people, which is what a lot of populists are suggesting doing anyway. Like, you know, one of the ways that you stay in power as somebody who would, you know, as an Erdogan or an Orban who, you know, he failed at that endeavor, but, or say even Trump during the COVID pandemic, is direct transfer cash transfers to people. And the main political parties in Ireland have been doing that for a very long time, funded in large part by, you know, all of the corporate tax revenue that is collected from American corporations that set up their, you know, offshore headquarters or subsidiaries or whatever here. And so the mainstream political parties have, have the Pleasure have enjoyed the freedom, the fiscal freedom to do what some populists oftentimes like to do or pursue one of the mechanisms by which they stay in power.
- [26:26]
B
Well, it's just much easier to be a populist if you're rolling in cash. Yeah, exactly, isn't it? Because by definition, as you say, you can effectively bribe the electorate. In fact, one of the things people say about why Viktor Orban finally went wrong was that he ran out of money, that some of the economic pressures that hit Hungary over the last five or six years meant that he wasn't able to judiciously apply money to parts of his constituency in the way that he was previously. And yeah, I think that's fair enough. I think it's true that the Irish centrist parties are populist. They're certainly not ideological in the sense that you would understand it perhaps in other countries. And certainly, I mean, I know you had David Runciman and Helen on from Britain and it's kind of glaringly obvious to us because they're our nearest neighbors and we see what's happening over there, this enormous constraint on politics of any kind, including Pierce Dahmer's current government, which has made enough mistakes of its own anyway. But they're so clearly hemmed in by the fiscal realities of 10 years of Brexit and the reality of what's going on in the UK that it makes it very difficult for them to do what is sometimes good politics, which is to keep their core base on board by giving them some goodies. There is a debate here in Ireland and it very often happens in this studio where economists tut, tut a lot about the way in which the Irish government is treating what are, in theory anyway, regarded as windfall receipts from corporate tax. You mentioned the.
- [27:54]
A
Oh, I listened to your episode with Sinead o'. Sullivan.
- [27:56]
B
Don't worry, Sinead puts it together pretty well. But people have been making this criticism for years and I think with some justification, the level of revenues coming from these very small number of American companies, probably about seven or eight companies, all of them are names that people will be familiar with. From Apple to Meta to Google to Pfizer to Eli Lilly and the OG intel, and indeed, indeed the og, all of those are delivering corporate tax receipts of tens of billions of euro. And on top of that, we got an extra added bonus goodie from Apple when a major European court case against Apple meant that Apple had to was
- [28:35]
A
forced to pay forced utilities of euro
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B
to the Irish government, even though the Irish government said it didn't want it because it didn't want Apple to be pissed off. It sets us up in a strange situation where this money is flowing in. It's really weird here because you don't necessarily know how much is going to come in next year. A lot of this is dependent on, and this is kind of above my pay grade as to how exactly it works. And that's why the people who operate it get paid an awful lot more than you or I do. But it's forms of frankly transfer pricing. I mean, all these companies have outlets in Ireland. They have people working here in Ireland, they have factories producing drugs. And if you go 10 minutes down the road here, you'll see what's called Google Land where there's just blocks full of people working for tech companies. But they're very adept at taking their profits in Ireland and then benefiting from the way that Irish tax works. I'm really torn about it, to be honest, because on one hand the country would probably be in a terrible state without this money. On the other hand, I think there's something immoral about the way in which the richest people in the world manage to avoid tax at the expense of many of the less well off people in the world. But we'll probably end up taking it for as long as we can. But the fear is, and there's always this underlying thing, I think in Irish politics the fear is that perhaps the whole thing's just going to fall apart in a year's time. It's not like some people compare this windfall to something like Norway's North Sea oil, which is sort of the best in class approach to what you do. When you get a fund benefit, the next very judicious about it, you really remember, make your society in a better way and you're very sensible about it and that we don't do that. But I think one of the reasons we don't do it is we literally don't know. I remember years ago meeting a senior executive from one of the big tech companies, I won't mention which, and he was in his office block and he swept his arm pointing to all the people working away there and he said, you know, we could land five 747s at Dublin Airport next week and take this whole thing out, move it somewhere else. And there is that, there is that fear there. So there is a kind of spend it while you have it mentality which then also has underlying it a fear that this may be a chimera. 2008 was a very big year in Ireland, what was known as the Celtic Tiger, which ran from the 1990s up until then. Our first real boom time just exploded and collapsed really quickly. And we went from being supposedly rich when people were buying apartments as investments in Bulgaria and all this kind of mad stuff, to becoming incredibly poor really fast. And I think there's still a. Not just a folk memory of that. It wasn't that long ago. It still hovers over us.
- [31:17]
A
Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit because of course, I know your conversation with Sinead o' Sullivan centered on the fact that Ireland hasn't put that money into infrastructure, you know, building things that make Ireland more prosperous down the line, you know, building more hospitals, building more roads. I've. I've spent a good amount of time driving in Ireland over the past week, so I have some familiarity with the complaints of what, what is it? The M50 and. And other roads as well. But just for listeners who aren't totally familiar, the way that this has worked in practice is that Ireland has a corporate tax rate of 12 and a half percent now that it's sort of gotten in line with OECD standards and then minimum tax rate, it's 15 if you make more than 750 million euros annually. And before this more rigid structure was put into place, there were even more elaborate ways that corporations could take advantage of the Irish tax system. You know, the double Irish, where you sort of set up one company in Ireland and one company outside of Ireland and work it in such a way that you can pay almost zero percent in corporate taxes. There are still plenty of deductions that corporations take that, you know, incentivize. And of course, there are things that are endogenous to Ireland, like an English speaking country with a pretty strong education system and all of those things, common law, et cetera. But it's created this system where a lot of American companies have come in, the ones you've mentioned, set up shop, have avoided paying taxes in places like Europe and the United States, where a lot of the work is done and
- [32:51]
B
a lot of pisses off, you know, the French, for example, entrepreneurship. Facebook sells ads in France and pays tax on them in Ireland.
- [32:57]
A
Exactly. And so it pisses off both sides of the Atlantic, but it also creates an environment where Ireland is so dependent on outside forces. Like 90% of the corporate tax bill is paid by foreign companies and nearly half of it is by just three. And so when it comes to economics, Ireland is incredibly reliant on American companies. And add to that, especially these Days that when it comes to security, Ireland is extremely reliant on NATO or the United States or whatever you want to call it, because it's a neutral country, it's not part of NATO. And so. So it sort of has this sense that either nothing will ever happen to Ireland or out of goodwill, somebody will back it up if something ever does. You spend less than a 1% of your GDP. I think it's like half of a percent of your GDP on defense. And so it puts Ireland in this tricky spot where both from an economic and security standpoint, it's so reliant on other countries, sort of goodwill or the whims of other countries.
- [34:02]
B
The kindness of strangers.
- [34:03]
A
The kindness of strangers. And it's sometimes, you know, and I think, I think of this in a broader context of Ireland has the story of Ireland is it's a victim of history and, you know, it was colonized and it's sort of made things right in many senses and has been this voice for social justice and sort of freedom and the plight of the downtrodden internationally. But it can only really do so much of that so credibly, without fear of the kindness of strangers being taken away. Like in some ways it prevents itself from amplifying its own voice because it's so reliant on everyone else.
- [34:42]
B
I think that's pretty true. And I think Ireland presented itself to the world in a way. Ireland benefited particularly well from the kind of political processes that kicked in from the late 80s onwards. The end of the Cold War, the rise of globalization, the increasing reach of the European Union, all those things. Ireland, as you say, for some of the reasons which you mentioned, being a small English language country which was also part of the European Union, having a young population, having a well educated population, which is an important part of this, it managed to basically have its cake and eat it, to face both ways. There used to be a phrase which is Dublin closer to Boston or Berlin, and a lot of the time it was closer to Boston. Boston, I think, culturally. But it also benefited from being part of that in the early years of that it benefited from major EU investments, significant investment in roads and in other things. Now we've arrived at the point where it's very much a net contributor to the EU because it's one of the, as you point out, it's one of the wealthiest countries in the eu. But we have new strains, as we know, emerging, new cracks emerging in the kind of the geopolitical order which raises questions which we've managed to kind of signally avoid up to now. And you rightly mention neutrality. Ireland is militarily neutral, but it's not neutral is the way that Ireland presents its word. I don't even know what that means. I'm not sure that anybody knows exactly what it means. I mean, what it does mean is that we don't, is that we're not part of the actual military alliance of NATO. There are kind of long, good historical reasons for that. They go back really to the Second World War when Ireland was neutral. There are moral questions where that raises as well, in which people have debated over the years since about whether it was right or wrong, but it was a reality. So our neutrality kind of arises out of the particularities of our history, only becoming independent a decade or two before the Second World War and our tricky relationship with the United Kingdom and all of that. But we did manage then to avoid our responsibilities to ourselves apart from to anybody else. Because the difference between us and other countries which have been neutral in Europe for years, like Switzerland or for many years Finland or Sweden, is those countries always spending a lot of money on defence. They saw a strong defence as being a kind of non negotiable part of being a neutral country. Ireland didn't. I mean, this may be part of the fact that just are brutally honest about it, our geographical position. Here we are stuck out in a rock on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Who the hell wants to come here and how hard would it be to get here in the first place? And therefore we're not really a threat to anybody. And maybe a bit in the same way during the Second World War, the reality is that the United Kingdom and the United States didn't mind that much that Ireland was neutral. They didn't really need it in any way. And probably it being neutral was as easy and I think it was neutral and friendly to the allies and helped them in various ways. The same has probably been true of the relationship with NATO over the years, but that's changing now because who knows where NATO's going. It's certainly under threat in various ways. And some of those formerly neutral other European countries are neutral no more. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. So we're in a pretty lonely club now. I mean, I think there's us, Switzerland, Austria and Malta. I think that's nearly it in Europe. And it always strikes me as a bit strange. You know, you'll have these summits in Brussels where there's an EU summit and two days later there's a NATO summit. And they're almost identical but not quite. I think Ireland is going to have to get to grips with that. There are things that have come to light that weren't necessarily known by the Irish public in previous years. For example, who does take care of Irish airspace? And it turns out that if something really serious happens, it's actually the raf. There's been a secret memorandum in operation for decades that doesn't chime very well with the Irish sense of pride in its own sovereignty and its own independence, which was won by previous generations. And very often the people who stand up for Irish neutrality, and I don't really have a strong position as to where this could go apart from the fact that it is going to change. But very often the people who stand up for it see it as very much a tradition of the Irish nationalist movement and they associate it with Ireland being part of during the Cold War, sort of a non aligned movement of postcolonial countries. I mean, you mentioned that earlier on. Ireland thinks of itself as a postcolonialist nation and so parallels are often drawn with countries in Asia and Africa in terms of the Irish experience. Experience. I've always had some reservations about that. Anyway, I don't know where this is going. There's a very strong resistance to closer military cooperation, even with the EU and certainly even more so with NATO. There is a recognition of the fact that Russia's assault on Ukraine is completely unacceptable. There's a lot of support, I think, for the Ukrainian position, but there are concerns about where that might lead.
- [39:38]
A
GD Politics is powered by you, the listeners. If you enjoy the show, the data driven analysis, the genuine curiosity and lack of partisan bs, and yes, sometimes the silliness too. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber@gdpolitics.com paid subscribers help make the podcast possible and they also get twice the number of episodes and access to the paid subscriber chat where you can send me whatever questions you've got. Independent political media only works if the people who value it support it. So if GD Politics is part of your week, head to GDPolitics.com and become a paid subscriber. That's GDPolitics.com I so appreciate it. Thank you. Maybe you mentioning the questions that surround not just Irish neutrality but also NATO itself leads us into perhaps the American portion of the conversation. I don't want to just pepper you with difficult questions about Irish sovereignty.
- [40:35]
B
Oh no, I like a difficult question.
- [40:37]
A
Independence and neutrality.
- [40:40]
B
Thank you for that. But let me put a question to you which is about a subject which I know you know a lot about because you did a fantastic series on gerrymandering in the United States five or six years ago now, I suppose, wasn't it? And of course, gerrymandering has been in the news a lot in the last while. I'm kind of gobsmacked by the gerrymandering situation. I mean, it's not an unknown problem in other democratic countries, but as far as I know, most well functioning democracies got over. We had some problems with it here in Ireland as well. Most well functioning democracies got over this decades ago by creating a cordon sanitaire between the elected politicians themselves and how these decisions are made. Been a lot of developments over the last while. Most of them seem to arise from the point at which the Supreme Court decided that it had no role in this matter. Would that be relevant?
- [41:32]
A
Right, yeah, I think. Well, it was never clear that the Supreme Court had a role in this matter. It was somewhat of a gray area and it determined for certain, I believe it was in 2018, that the question of partisan gerrymandering, whether or not you're allowed to consider the partisanship of the voters when you're drawing the districts, is non judistrable, which is to say the Supreme Court Court will play no role in determining that. If Congress wants to pass a law, if the states want to pass their own laws, they can, but that's not up for the courts to decide. Now, racial gerrymandering is a different question because that's reliant on the vra. The Voting Rights act that still stands today has been sort of modified somewhat with the most recent Supreme Court ruling in Calais this session.
- [42:20]
B
Yeah, and I sort of understand that because the kind of the, the ways in which other countries sorted it out was not, not, you know, it was not in the court. It was a political decision. You know, laws were passed.
- [42:30]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think that we are as, as they say, laboratories of democracy. So different states have tried different things to mitigate the effects of partisan gerrymandering to differing degrees of success. You know, probably the most popular approach was something like a bipartisan or independent commission where you get together people of different parties, plus independents, people who are not politicians themselves, to work together with map makers. You tell them to prioritize a certain number of things like competitiveness, compactness, interest groups, et cetera.
- [43:10]
B
That's what we have with our electoral commission here.
- [43:12]
A
And those laws were passed in places like Arizona, California, Michigan, and they worked. I mean, we detailed this on the gerrymandering project that they don't work perfectly because you're always going to be able to debate like what, what is a coherent interest group? Is it the businesses that exist within that jurisdiction? Is it the people? Is it a certain ethnicity? Is it a certain, you know, a hobby? In California, one of the interest groups that sort of lobbied to have their own congressional district was horseback riders. So, so some of it can be legitimate, some of it can be kind of bullshit. And a lot of times there are politicians behind the scenes trying to pull the strings to get their preferences. But when you have a system like that, it's nothing as sort of flagrant as drawing these totally mutated looking districts that just piece together, you know, a little bit of a city with, you know, a suburban area plus a rural area to make sure that it's, you know, more than 10 points leaning in one party's direction or another.
- [44:10]
B
And technology has assisted that process. Hasn't it it possible to be really sophisticated in drawing these lines to your, to your benefit?
- [44:17]
A
Technology has assisted that process. But you know what has assisted it more? Us Americans have become increasingly polarized and predictable in terms of how they behave electorally. It is simply not possible to gerrymander people whom you don't already have a good sense of how they might vote. Hmm. It's just not possible. And so part of the reason gerrymandering has become such an issue in the 21st century in America is because our divides are so cemented, in a sense. And so how are we going to see ourselves out of this? Like I mentioned, there's the laboratories of democracy path, but we're actually moving in the opposite direction from that. Many of the states, more Democratic states than Republican states that implemented these kinds of commissions are trying to undo them, to respond to.
- [45:10]
B
Well, there's been this kind of weapons race that started with Texas, moved to California, went forward and back in Virginia. And it's, and it's ongoing as we speak.
- [45:17]
A
And so I think increasingly there's an acknowledgment, particularly amongst Democrats. And to be clear, gerrymandering is unpopular amongst all Americans. If you ask in a poll, it's, you know, 75% or something like that of Americans reject gerrymandering. I think it's even 60% of Republicans. And, and so I think there's increasingly an idea that it's not going to happen on a state by state level. And so the only clear pathway that I see is federal legislation. Now federal legislation. And Democrats say, oh, well, we tried this with HR1 and Republicans wouldn't get on Board, which was the first legislation introduced when Democrats won the house after the 2018 midterms. And that's a little bit of bullshit because HR1, yes addressed gerrymandering, but it also addressed, like everything else under the sun, it an omnibus of electoral reforms that it was clear Republicans were never going to get on board with.
- [46:10]
B
So this bad faith goes around. It's not just one party, it was a messaging bill.
- [46:14]
A
No one ever thought that that bill was going to become law when they introduced it. And so, you know, maybe there becomes a situation where we, we sort of maximalize gerrymandering as much as max it out. You know, there becomes a sense that, that in this battle, one party over the other isn't going to have a clear advantage. Because I don't think that is the case. You know, if blue states maximally gerrymander and red states maximally gerrymander, I think you get something of a draw, but you get a very stuck rigid politics where there are like, I don't know, 15 competitive districts.
- [46:49]
B
Yeah. And also you get vast swathes of the country not getting any representation at all. If you're a Democrat in a red state, you know, you have no hope ever of being represented in the same way, the other way. Read.
- [47:01]
A
And so perhaps federal legislation is the answer, but I think in order for that federal legislation, I mean, it's more of a priority for Democrats, I think, than Republicans, to be clear. And I think the thing that people sometimes forget in this gerrymandering conversation is a red district, a district that's drawn to have a majority of Republicans or blue district. What? It's not divined by God that those people have to vote that way. I mean, I mean, bring a little entrepreneurship to the table. Try to win those voters, because you're probably not going to be able to pass federal legislation if you don't have a large enough majority that includes red district number one. And number two, if you aren't able to pass federal legislation, then the only other thing you can do is frustrate American politics enough so that those gerrymanders don't work. Right. Because those people are not legally obligated to vote for a certain party once they get drawn into that district.
- [47:53]
B
And exactly to that, that's the point which I was saying just before we started recording the kind of history of gerrymander in other countries is that it can backfire on people. I mean, we had a recent example of this in Hungary where Viktor Orban had two decades of tinkering with the electoral system to turn it to his advantage so that getting 45 to 48% of the vote because his party was popular, delivered 75 to 80% of the seats in parliament. And he managed to rig things in various ways, and then he was. Was bitten in the ass by it when he was faced by an opposition party that was unified and was clearly more popular than him. Is the same true or possibly true in red states, I wonder? Because the other thing that's happened is this further rolling back of Voting Rights act application in certain southern states which conservatives refer to as racial gerrymander, which technically it is in a way, and I know you've covered this in the past. One of the effects of, of that Voting Rights act legislation, which specifically set out to create districts with a sufficiently large number of black voters that they would elect, it was presumed, a black
- [49:01]
A
congressman or the candidate of their choice
- [49:03]
B
or the candidate of Tennessee, a majority of black people would want to see. But that also meant then that all those black voters were packed into one district and, and that equally militated against actual electoral competition in a marketplace of ideas, which is ideally what you want from a democracy.
- [49:23]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that gets lost in this conversation because I don't think that there's so much good faith in the political discourse in America today, is that even if Democrats want to say that the Voting Rights act as previously interpreted, which it was never totally clear what it meant, did it have to be a majority of black voters? Did it have to be a enough black voters that they could make up a majority in the primary and then combine with, you know, a broader racial coalition to make up a majority in the general, you know, and of course, Democrats would oftentimes argue for the position that would just get them more seats, you know, as opposed to necessarily the one that would ensure the most black representation in Congress or in the state legislature or whatever, you know, famously in North Carolina after the 2010 census and the redraw, Republicans for the first time controlled all three, you know, branch, you know, upper chamber, lower chamber, and the governor's mansion. And the way that they drew the state level map was so that North Carolina had never had more black representation. It's in its entire existence. And Democrats were fully shut out of power. So it would ensure that there would be more black representatives than ever before and they would never be in the majority. And, you know, that's also a bad faith move, you know, in some, in some sense, sure. But one thing that's lost on the left is like it's sort of like, well, you either interpret the Voting Rights act in the way that we want to interpret it, or you're racist or something like, you know, something like that. There are costs to these kinds of racial considerations, the nuance of which, like, people don't really want to engage in. In American politics. Oftentimes, you know, I just described one of them. But another one is, is that so often black politicians end up representing districts that are, say, like 45 to 70% black. And that does not necessarily prepare you very well to run a statewide campaign. You know, the Voting Rights act was extremely successful at getting black lawmakers into Congress. You know, from the 60s onward, it accomplished. And I mean, black lawmakers had been shut out, particularly from the south, you know, since Reconstruction.
- [51:35]
B
Just to be clear about it, America was not a fully functioning democracy until the mid-1960s at the very earliest.
- [51:40]
A
Now, I mean, some of the most important pieces of the Voting Rights act have to do with actually, you know, the franchise itself, being able to vote, et cetera. But one of also the costs of considering race in this way is that black politicians oftentimes end up in a situation where they are not running for office in competitive districts, districts not taking on policy positions that would prepare them to run in competitive districts and therefore go on to run statewide. And something that the Voting Rights act did not help do, for the most part, is help black politicians get elected to statewide office, like senators, seats and governorships.
- [52:19]
B
So they're stuck at the congressional level or the state.
- [52:22]
A
The most famous example of this is Barack Obama himself. He lost a congressional race in the year 2000 to Bobby Rush. It was, I think, a 60 or 70% black district on the south outside of Chicago, and sort of the kind of politics that he would have had to take on in order to represent that district, I don't think would have been. Would have primed him to win statewide in Illinois and go on to become President of the United States. You can say that's good or bad or neutral or whatever, but there are costs that come with, you know, considering.
- [52:58]
B
So that's kind of the. It's. It's an argument which I associate with conservative critics, but doesn't necessarily mean that. That it's wrong. It's. Is that some of this legislation which was put in place with the intention of combating segregation, its impacts are ultimately segregationist.
- [53:14]
A
I think what most people would. I mean, you know, I think that what many people would say today is that level the playing field when it comes to partisanship and the Rest will sort itself out. I think there are plenty of, of civil rights advocates who would say, no, we still need, there is still racism in America and we still need particular laws on the books that ensure that black voters are drawn into districts where they represent a majority of the voters.
- [53:46]
B
What do you think of that? Because clearly there is still racism in America. There's racism in Ireland, there's racism in every country. And America has a particularly torturous history with slavery and everything. But the danger of that is you just perpetuate.
- [53:58]
A
I think the, the real question here in terms of whether or not this kind of system is still needed is are white Democrats willing to vote for a black candidate? Because of course there are black Republicans, there are very few of them, so they kind of get left out of this conversation to some degree. But if white Democrats are willing to vote for black candidates and willing to vote for black candidates at the same rate as white candidates candidates, then probably the most important piece is that you take the partisanship considerations and what does
- [54:32]
B
the data say on that?
- [54:33]
A
The data suggests that, you know, by and large, white Democrats are willing to vote for black candidates today. Now again, there are costs that would come with moving in this direction, which, for example, you know, maybe black candidates are also starting to try to appeal to like the, the issue priorities of white voters and whatnot as opposed to strictly, you know, the experience of black Americans and whatnot. And that's a debate that folks should have. And I'm not ready to sort of come down on one side or the other, but this is a very complicated. I mean, and it's not a question that just pertains to districts. It's also a question that pertains to how we consider race. You know, the Supreme Court of course, ruled on affirmative action and said that it was not constitutional for universities to consider race when deciding whether or not to accept applicants. It's allowed to look at a holistic picture of an applicant and their experience and all of that stuff. But the sort of strict understanding of affirmative action, not constitutional.
- [55:35]
B
And in both these cases, both the electoral one and the affirmative action, it's an interpretation which is quite persuasive. It seems to me that the 14th Amendment, the one which got away with race based slavery in the wake of the Civil War, in theory at least, prohibited actions taken on the basis of race alone. So I mean, that's the basis on which the Supreme Court is, is unimpressed by the Voting Rights act and by diversity initiatives, isn't it?
- [56:01]
A
Yeah, in large part, yes. The Supreme Court basically says that race can be considered, but it has to, you know, and I'm not a legal scholar, but it has to sort of check a whole bunch of boxes. It's like we tried everything else first and there was no other way of doing it is kind of what the, the legal standard is in lay terms. And I think that whether you agree with that or not, whether you think there should be more racial considerations or fewer racial considerations, we don't have a very full conversation about these things in America. Like, things get reduced pretty quickly to my team, your team, good faith, bad faith. And I'm always, you know, me, it's always my side is good faith. And you, your side is always bad faith, faith.
- [56:47]
B
Can I just ask you about something? I mean, I take that on board and I'm kind of jumping in with a left field question and then you come back at me about something about Ireland. I mean, there are various problems with the American system. And I hear discussions quite similar to ones we have on this day of the Atlantic is often about systems and electoral systems and party systems and things like that. But the fact is we share a lot of these problems, you know, regardless of these systems, you know, a lot of the time. But there's one thing that always strikes me about American politics is that, as I understand it, the Founding Fathers were appalled by the idea of political parties. And I don't know any political system in which two parties are so embedded, you know, so institutionally embedded in the process as they are in the United States. I don't know anywhere else where the actual, you know, state governments run internal party elections or I don't know any other country where, you know, it's commonplace for senior public figures, public servants, to describe themselves as being, you know, a Republican or a Democrat. You wouldn't get that here with people saying, I'm a fiannaful person, I'm a fine Gael person. They might be or they might not be, but it's not foregrounded in the same way. And I just, I wonder, I mean, we mentioned earlier the British system where weirdly, you can get a super majority with 30% of the voters or something like that. The American version of what the British call first pass the post, where it's winner takes all combined with this rootedness and binary of two parties seem to be at the heart of a lot of, of a lot of the. The ways in which America is stuck, it seems to me.
- [58:14]
A
Well, that used to be considered a strength of America, right? That we didn't have the Rise of all of these fringe parties because we had such a dominant duopoly and that, you know, for a long time, one of the reasons for all of this investment and faith in the dollar and, you know, reliance on American law and systems and whatever is because we were so stable. And so instead of having living like in a country like Italy, where I, I spent some time growing up in my youth and was very familiar with the full breadth of, you know, the political spectrum where you have people who are literally like, my family's communist. My family are, you know, they wouldn't say we're straight up fascists, but we live here. We, we root for the soccer team and whatnot, and that's who we are.
- [58:59]
B
And so you're better off with these two massive coalitions, each of which had a big span from left to right with within its big tent.
- [59:05]
A
Yes. And that the mainstream would always win out against this fringe. And that was basically successful until the parties themselves became very weak. And that's in part due to the democratization of our primary system. So essentially our nominees used to be picked in a way that's very similar to how they're picked in Ireland, which is that it's the party's responsibility themselves to figure out the candidates that they would like to field. Party members get a say and then the national parties sort of get to influence the candidate selection, you know, the final say on candidate selection and whatnot. We in America call them smoke filled rooms, where the horse we call them as well.
- [59:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, after you guys.
- [59:51]
A
And it creates a sort of, you know, patronage backslapping kind of system. But it also keeps some pretty strict checks, effects on the options that Americans ever have, the voters ever have. And that started to be democratized in the early 70s and after some just
- [60:12]
B
really the Chicago convention and all that,
- [60:15]
A
all that kind of stuff. I don't have to tell you, our
- [60:18]
B
listeners know all about that.
- [60:19]
A
And the parties figure out a way through cash and endorsements and whatnot to, to steer the primary process in the direction that they wanted, but with sort of more and more outside cash. With the crackup of the establishment media and digital forms of media and politicians being able to speak more directly to the voters and what new ways of raising money from grassroots donors and all that jazz. The parts kind of lost control of this process. And I think, you know, Howard Dean is one example in 2004, like a minor example of the party bigwigs kind of losing control of the process. Bernie Sanders is a bit of another example, but Donald Trump is The big one, the big example is Donald Trump. And it's not just like the two party system that produced Donald Trump. It was, was somebody kind of who could wield enough media attention, had enough money, charisma, whatever, to win like 30, less than 35% in many cases of that primary electorate, but still a plurality. And then, and then once that happened, enough of the partisanship is baked in that you can get everyone else on board. And now, 10 years on, he's changed American politics through and through. But how did this start? Start? I think you kind of have to look at the primary system that we have in America. And I think a lot of people would look at it and say it sucks or maybe it should be changed or maybe we should have more parties
- [61:54]
B
or I see this, the perfect illustration of one of my less popular opinions, which is you can have too much democracy that certain moves. And you're right in saying that things are run by the parties on this side of the Atlantic, but even they have democratized within themselves to some degree. And so you'll see some parties in, in Europe, it'll be the membership as a whole who votes, whereas traditionally it might have just been the parliamentary party who elects the leaders. And in my opinion, you're often better off with the parliamentary party who by definition are people who have been elected by the entire population to come to a decision as to who their leader should be. The idea of just having a bunch of people who chose to self register as Republicans or Democrats decide who is going to be one of the only two people who will be on the ballot effectively for the presidency seems like a terrible way to do it to me.
- [62:39]
A
And there are again some entrepreneurs in governance who are trying to change the system and do jungle primaries or top two primaries where Republicans and Democrats run together and the top two vote getters move on to the general election. They have that system in California, they have that system in Alaska. And it is those kinds of systems that have produced more sort of, I don't know, mavericky candidates and politicians like say, say Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, for example, like folks who would have Republicans who would have voted to convict Donald Trump in the Senate after his second impeachment.
- [63:16]
B
It's more likely to produce a candidate who is popular with the center ground, whereas the other system very often incentivizes a candidate who appeals to the marginal extreme of whichever party it is.
- [63:28]
A
I will also say though that in Ireland, Holland, it's easier to make the argument that there should be less democracy in the primary system. Because you have a bunch of different parties. So. And you can start a new party if you want. In America. That's really, really hard. If we're going to start a new party, it's probably going to be an Elon Musk type figure. He would obviously, or she would obviously have to be, you know, American by birth and very rich and, but importantly, very, very, very rich and able to marshal a ton of media attention. And it's done of lot a Trump proved. If you want to start, quote, unquote, a new party in America, the easiest way is to just do it through one of the existing parties, like move it in a new direction as opposed to starting a new party. Because if you only have two parties and those sort of party leaders are choosing the, the candidates, the nominees all the time, then politics can become less reactive to sort of popular wishes. It's interesting, in one of the the recent episodes of your podcast that I was listening to after the by elections, someone was accusing Sinn Fein of being led too much by the voters. Sometimes, you know, moving policy or positions based on where the voters are. And I thought to myself, well, why is that a problem In a democracy, what the people want ought to matter. And I do think that in the two party system, Pretoria, Trump, there was a lot of demand for things that were not being offered.
- [64:59]
B
Do you think the United States would be better if it had five or six or seven parties?
- [65:03]
A
I think it would just be fucked up in different ways.
- [65:06]
B
That's true.
- [65:07]
A
Same as, same as every European country that has five or six or seven parties.
- [65:11]
B
You know, like it's like the deal thing about, you know, all happy families are the same, all unhappy family families are different. I mean, we're all our own sorts of unhappy families really, you know.
- [65:19]
A
Indeed, indeed. And you know, like I sort of, while it's a Friday, I'm feeling loose. I've been on vacation for a week. You know, I am a pretty patriotic person. I like the United States an awful lot. I enjoy living there. And to me, one of the reasons I feel that way is because I spent a good amount of time not living in the United States. I was living in Turkey in 2010 and 2011. I was. So of course, around the time when Erdogan sort of move from being something more of a conciliatory leader to a more sort of populist Islamist leader. I was living in Rome during Silvio Berlusconi's prime ministership. And you know, there were their features of those countries and those politics that I was like Damn, I really like America now. Mm. We've taken a page out of those, you know, leaders books to some extent over the past 10 years and there are real problems that we're grappling with. But I think we still have a lot of strengths and I think one of, you know, we are confronting some of these problems from a place of a lot of institutional memory and a sort of strong foundation. And I think that in the same way that we engage, you know, the politics today in America is fraught and sort of who we are and what we stand for and who we want to be in the future and what people's, you know, whose priorities we want to prioritize. Do we want to be engaged in wars abroad? Do we want to be building infrastructure back at home, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are all sort of great conversations, great debates to be had, having. I trust that we can keep having them. You know, I don't, I'm not a doomer about America's future. That's good. I'm pretty optimistic. That's good to hear.
- [67:11]
B
Because you don't hear that that often these days.
- [67:14]
A
Well, that's just because you're talking to leftists. No, I'm kidding. But you know, I mean, there is
- [67:20]
B
a thing, I will say that there is a grain of truth in, in what you say. Ireland tends to see the United States through a blue filtered lens. That's partly because the kind of long standing ties between the Democratic Party and Irish America, that's part because of the kind of media and include myself in this that we consume. So I mean, it is kind of interesting these days because of the way media has changed. There are probably quite a lot of New York Times subscribers among the Irish listeners to this show, which wouldn't have been the case probably even 10 years ago. You know, they'll mention Ezra Klein podcasts and those, those kinds of things. They'd be less likely to mention conservative news networks. So I try to listen to people from what you might call the other side there and that you had Sarah Isgarh on your podcast last week. I think she's a really good analyst of Supreme Court and, and she comes from it with an unashamedly conservative perspective while bringing real knowledge to the table.
- [68:14]
A
And not all of our listeners love that. But, you know, I think it's important to hear a diversity of opinion.
- [68:19]
B
I mean, this is, this is. Podcasts are great, aren't they? But this is problem with podcasts. You know, we're familiar with the kind of the parasocial relationship. The fact that the listeners expect certain things and get discombobulated if you don't, you know, don't give them what they they what they want.
- [68:32]
A
It's so funny. That's going to bring this whole conversation full circle. The reason I'm in Ireland right now, Speaking of, you know, Irish people increasingly listening to or consuming American media. The reason I'm in Ireland right now is because I was at a party in 2022 and I went to introduce myself to these two Irish guys. Like, from Ireland. Again, when I say Irish, I don't mean like my grandmother, Martha Clare McNamara. Yeah, people with Irish accents. Yes, exactly. I went to introduce myself and I said, oh, hi, I'm Galen. And I said, yeah, I know. We listened to the 538 politics podcast. Those are the two people who got married in Dublin last Saturday. And so, yes, increasingly Irish folks listening to American podcasts and consuming American media. And also that parasocial relationship that sometimes can be very weird and, and fraught, but sometimes can land you in Ireland during the most beautiful week of weather in recent memory.
- [69:37]
B
Yeah, again, false data alert there. I think we should leave it there because I don't know how long your podcasts normally are, but ours are normally slightly shorter than this. I'll get into trouble with Declan, our producer, but I was always prepared to do that because I really wanted to get you in when you gave us a call last week. Weekend. It's. It's great to talk to you and great to meet you, Gun.
- [69:57]
A
Well, it's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. It's Galen again here popping in to say thanks for listening. I had a great time in Ireland and if you made it through this whole podcast and still want more Ireland content, I did post a whole bunch of photos over on the Instagram. I'm not all that active there, but sometimes I do like to cosplay influencer when I'm in a place as beautiful as Southwest Ireland. Anyway, that's it for today. Remember to subscribe to the GD Politics podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you listen to podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and access to the paid subscriber chat. And most importantly, ensure that we can keep making this independent podcast. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.