The other day, while wasting my time in the preferred contemporary style – scrolling on my phone in a fugue state of mild boredom and almost subliminal irritation – I came across a strangely compelling video from a right-wing content creator. The clip, which had gone viral on social media, was compelling not because it was interesting or even especially provocative, but because of its contradictory mix of soporific blandishment and reactionary politics.
The creator of the video, a man in late middle age – bespectacled, white-haired, wearing a shirt and tie and looking for all the world like the manager of a regional credit union branch – faces the camera, addressing the viewer, while colour footage of Ireland from the 1970s plays behind him. People getting in and out of Ford Cortinas. A guard on a bicycle. Convent girls walking down the street eating ice creams. A grimacing auld lad in a flat cap. Two small children conferring with deep seriousness at a bus stop. A man in a shop coat delivering a crate of milk bottles. These scenes are uniformly bathed in the soft glow of late summer sunlight, and over it all a gentle and melancholy traditional Irish air plays.
All the while, his head and torso hovering around the lower third of the screen, the content creator keeps up his steady commentary. In a soft and wistful voice, he delivers a melancholy oration about how the Ireland depicted in this film is gone, having been sold out by our leaders to the globalists of the EU.
“What you see there,” he says, pointing upwards at a tractor idling at an intersection, “that’s the real Ireland. Oh, we were so rich! We were rich beyond our wildest dreams, and we didn’t even know it! It was an age of innocence. But we have been sold out. Our leaders took the money, and they wanted us to become Europeans. They paid them off. They bought them.”
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It goes on like this for a while, a Faustian narrative of recent Irish history building to a mournful soundtrack of fiddle and uilleann pipes. “This Ireland here is gone,” he reiterates, pointing, for some reason, at a guy driving a forklift at a recklessly brisk clip through a car park. “They took this from you.”
If you’re familiar with the standard linguistic gestures of the online right, this last line – delivered twice for emphasis – arrives with the dull comic thunk of cliche. “This is what they took from us” became a popular rallying cry about a decade ago, in online right-wing spaces, where it was used to caption nostalgic images of a patriarchal and racially homogenous past, typically pre-civil-rights-era US suburbia. Before long, it was taken up and ridiculed by legions of internet ironists, who used it to caption photos of classic video games graphics, discontinued soft drinks flavours, McDonald’s playgrounds from the 1990s.
Part of the reason I was struck by the video is that it’s so rare to see the cliche employed earnestly and, as it were, in the wild. Even more remarkable, though, was how badly it seemed to fit with an Irish context. You can see how, in an American context, this particular brand of weaponised sentimentality might operate on an emotional level for white conservatives convinced that the so-called social progress of the last 60 years or so has brought nothing but diminishment and degradation to their people. And you can see, too, how it might work in a similar way for British conservatives who have, for decades, been huffing the toxic fumes of imperial nostalgia.
Ireland’s situation, though, is entirely different. There is, of course, no shortage of dissatisfaction with the shape of modernity in this country, much of it centring around increased immigration and multiculturalism. And I would not for a moment want to get complacent about the prospect of an organised far right mobilising and gaining a serious electoral foothold through the exploitation of these dissatisfactions.
But it would require a particularly high level of ideological derangement for an Irish person to take the narrative presented in that YouTube video at face value. The country we live in today is no utopia, but you would have to be borderline insane – with a strong sentimental attachment to poverty and oppressive theocracy, to grinding misogyny and institutional child abuse – to feel nostalgic for the Ireland of the 1970s. In fact – and I suspect this might be the crucial point – you would pretty much have to not be Irish at all.
Just as the format of this kind of content is imported from American online discourse, it seems clear that it is not intended for consumption by Irish people. The anti-immigrant right is, ironically, an increasingly internationalist movement, in which the West as a whole is seen to be eaten away from within by insidious enemies. The reductive vision of a bucolic Irish past might seem absurd to most Irish people, but it lands in a different way for conservative Americans, for whom an increasingly multicultural modernity is an offence against a romanticised Irishness they never had much contact with in the first place. It’s for these people, I suspect, that this sort of content is mostly produced.
And it seems to me, too, that such content doesn’t function solely or even primarily as propaganda. Like so much online political material, from every location on the ideological spectrum, it is content for content’s sake.
And here we arrive at a deeper irony. This melancholy ode to a lost innocence – to a people once deeply connected to nation and community – comes to us from that most denatured and alienated of contemporary subjects: a producer of content for the unseen algorithms of YouTube, X and TikTok.
It would be a mistake, however, to read this kind of incoherence as a weakness; if anything, it increases the power of such material, its seductive stupidity. “The very contradictions of the doctrine, and their irrational resolution,” as the playwright David Edgar put it in an essay on British fascism, “are at the core of its functional effectiveness as a mobiliser of support.” The extreme right has always drawn strength from its own glaring internal inconsistencies.
The makers of this sort of reactionary cultural landfill would not be much interested in such things, but we Irish did once have a distinct indigenous line in conservative anti-modernity. It is, in fact, unquestionably a major part of our history and culture. Far be it from me to wax nostalgic about a lost colonial ruling class, but we used to make guys like Edmund Burke in this country. For God’s sake, we used to make guys like WB Yeats. Romantic Ireland really is dead and gone. This is what they took from us.
