How do we get from a risible political farce at a cattle fair in Macroom in 1992 to the possible next governor of California? It’s a wildly improbable journey but one that tells us a great deal about how democratic politics lost its marbles.
Our story begins on November 22nd, 1992, in that fine market town in Co Cork. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds is fighting for his political life in a general election. Fianna Fáil has done something extraordinary. The party whose founder used to look into his own heart to know what the Irish people are thinking has hired a 23-year-old Englishman called Stephen Hilton from Tory Party headquarters via the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to help mastermind its campaign.
This is, in retrospect, an illuminating moment. Fianna Fáil is, at the time, arguably the most successful political machine in the democratic world. But now it has decided that the future lies with spin – and that spin has no history and no geography. Politics is a set of techniques that can be applied anywhere at any time.
So Reynolds is up on the back of a lorry at a cattle fair in Macroom. Sean Duignan, the much-loved RTÉ correspondent who has become Reynolds’s press secretary, describes the scene in his diary: “A deputation of local farmers approach me and say they want to talk about ‘headage’. Insanely, I point them in the direction of Stephen [Hilton] who had just told me he had never been in Ireland (never mind Macroom) before. Charlie Bird and I can see them surrounding the poor hoor and still haranguing him five minutes later. The two of us rolling around like bold children.”
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It’s a great comic moment – the humiliation of the placeless, ambient political technocrat confronted by the grassroot realities of headage payments and cattle dung. But the joke will morph – and it will ultimately be on all of us.
Fast forward a decade to 2012. In The Thick of It, the most devastating political satire of our times, Armando Iannucci creates a brilliant caricature of the ultimate purveyor of modish political gobbledegook (“I like the plasmic nature of your data modelling”) – the Tory super-strategist Stewart Pearson. Everybody knows that Stewart is Stephen – now of course “Steve” – Hilton.
Pearson is a magnificent comic creation (for anyone who remembers The Thick of It, just think “And ho!”) but he’s so close to Hilton that David Cameron, for whom he is now “director of strategy”, has to deny that the caricature is accurate. Hilton is sending out bulletins to Tory members saying stuff like: “This week: an update on our plans for National Citizen Service – some cool ways of harnessing the power of information – a really useful way of describing the post-bureaucratic age.”
According to the Guardian, during the period Cameron is in power, “Hilton would reportedly pad the halls of Downing Street in socks, ordering civil servants to enact his latest hare-brained scheme”. He prefigures our current state in which satire is indistinguishable from reality.
Hilton is not an idiot, however. He manages to transform Cameron’s Tories from their self-admitted image as “the nasty party” into a green, progressive, polar bear-loving, hoody-hugging fluffiness. Not because any of these things are real but because they detoxify the brand.
[ US democracy is in danger, but what about Ireland?Opens in new window ]
Hilton’s actual behind-the-scenes proposals include scrapping maternity leave and drastically cutting welfare payments. But that’s mere reality – the show of kinder, gentler Toryism is what matters.
All of that niceness melts away faster than the polar bears’ ice floes. The vicious class war of “austerity” and the idiocy of Brexit make the Tories nasty again. The Cameron project ends in historic ignominy.
But Steve is ahead of the game. He moves on – to California in 2012. He gets in with the tech-bro crowd. And he also gets in early on urging them to make their peace with Donald Trump in 2016. Yes, he argues, Trump displays “almost crazed indiscipline” and alas there are “revelations about his attitude to women that nobody could possibly defend”. But so what? Let’s stick it to “America’s insular ruling elite [and] their snooty and divisive contempt for working people”.
There’s a direct line between the debacle in Macroom and this faux anti-elitist shtick. The callow Hilton in 1992 is a harbinger of the hollowing-out of party politics, the reduction of democracy to just another form of advertising: define the brand, construct the images, shape the slogans. Voters get to understand that democracy is cynical and hollow. Why not blow them all up with a stick of dynamite in the shape of an almost crazed misogynist?
And now fast forward another 10 years from 2016.
Where is Steve now? After a period as a Fox News host, he is Donald Trump’s candidate for governor of California. Trump posts on his Truth Social platform: “I have known and respected Steve Hilton, who is running for Governor of California, for many years ... Steve can turn it around, before it is too late, and, as President, I will help him to do so! ... Steve Hilton has my COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.”
It may seem a very long way from Macroom to Maga. But it isn’t. What was happening in 1992 in Fianna Fáil was not of global significance – except in one respect. It foreshadowed the loss of belief among historic political parties in content, in connection, in conviction. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the contest of ideas seemed to be over. Democracy was a branch of marketing. Elections were about which product could be made to feel most authentic and most emotionally satisfying.
[ We must not underestimate the peril for democracyOpens in new window ]
Hilton’s career traces a perfect arc from the debasement of democratic politics to its replacement by authoritarian personality cults. He didn’t know about headage payments in 1992. But he did know that hardline Toryism could be repackaged as a desire to try a little tenderness. And he did know that oligarchic fascism could be dressed up as anti-elitism.
The joke in Macroom is on all of us now.
