Kathy Sheridan: The trouble with Maureen Dowd’s brother? He’s wrong

Last week, the US media was full of advice about how to cope with being hothoused among family members who brought a different set of beliefs to the Thanksgiving party.

Columnist Maureen Dowd’s annual Thanksgiving with her Trumpist siblings has become a November feature in the New York Times. The theme is universal, since many of us have had to find an accommodation of some kind with Trumpist/Brexity relatives in similar circumstances.

Dowd manages the problem by handing the writing of her column to her brother, Kevin, a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpist. So, come November, Kevin gets the annual treat of seeing his unchallenged views laid before millions in a reputable newspaper, while all that seasonal tension in the Dowd family is neatly dissipated once Kevin has been appeased.

The problem is the reader’s, of course. It may be intriguing the first time round, but its novelty value is short.

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Dowd has described how her political writing has brought a regrettable chill into her relationships with her siblings in different political eras. They include Kevin, a friend of Brett Kavanaugh for 35 years before the latter's explosively controversial elevation to the US supreme court. When brother and sister discussed their deeply opposing views, Kevin's clincher was that family trumps all. "… Politics should not be the determining factor in your life, high up on your emotional scale. You should realise that family always is more important…"

‘Rather self-righteous’

My family, right or wrong. This is roughly the same argument on a wider scale employed by a Fine Gael supporter last week who said I was "rather self-righteous" on foot of a column about the Verona Murphy fiasco. I should remember, he wrote, "that others are fallible, they trip up and make mistakes – she [this writer] and others inflicted huge distress on another member of FG", he added – "be kind!".

But in the current context, what are these men demanding of us ? What does “politics” or “kindness” mean on these pages?

In the age of Trump and his strongmen buddies such as Erdogan, Duterte, Putin and Bolsonaro, politics is no longer just about the corporate tax rate or the ratio of social housing. We live in a time when the US president describes a white supremacist mob with flaming torches and "blood and soil" battle chants as "very fine people"; a time when experts believe that an openly racist, far-right cohort is gaining a foothold in our own country; a time when a bill to ban abortion in Ohio requires doctors to "reimplant an ectopic pregnancy" into a woman's uterus – a procedure that does not exist – or face charges of "abortion murder"; a time when the US president refers to career civil servants as " human scum" and the House impeachment investigation as " bullshit".

This is Trump culture. This is personal. And it matters to us because what happens in Ohio or Charlottesville or Washington DC echoes around the world at the speed of light, finds a foothold somewhere in some dark corner of someone's psyche, and finds an outlet in a Dublin halal shop or on the election trail.

Those who eye Trump, Pence and the current manifestation of the Republican Party with a visceral loathing have reason to do so, just as they should question the mindset of people who fund them and attend their conferences. These men are rapidly reshaping the world in their image, funded by shadowy billionaires, conniving with hostile foreign powers to undermine democracies and institutions of state, shredding fragile international agreements in an infantile fit of pique and treating their private business interests as indistinguishable from the state's.

Narcissistic president

Kevin's glowing focus on the markets, deregulation and the supreme court (where his friend is now safely stacked) and the fact that he feels safe in his bed "with the way the president is handling Iran and North Korea", left no space, presumably, to address the soaring US national debt (once the big stick used to batter the Democrats) or the perils of a climate-denying, racist, misogynistic, narcissistic president, and the fallout of that poison on other people's precious families around the world. "All aid is quid pro quo," Kevin writes, and civil servants should obey the boss without question, or quit. Which is probably the scariest point among many.

This is not about politics or kindness. What our Fine Gael twitter poster perceived as a personal attack on an individual was a view on how a government candidate’s series of dangerous statements was disastrously mishandled by the governing party. The other FG member referred to in the tweet was also a political figure with high ambitions who was happy to air his opinions and allegiances.

Angela Merkel’s trenchant speech last week should be cited repeatedly: “We have freedom of expression in our country. For all those who claim that they can no longer express their opinion, I say this to them: If you express a pronounced opinion, you must live with the fact that you will be contradicted. Expressing an opinion does not come at zero cost.

“But freedom of expression has its limits. Those limits begin where hatred is spread. They begin where the dignity of other people is violated.”