Liberalism, observes O’Hehir, has gradually withered among Irish-Americans, which means Irish-American politics these days is light on a “social-justice component” and heavy on “a bunch of unappealing right-wing guys yelling at us”:
On this St. Patrick’s Day weekend, if you’re in the mood for a lamentation of Irish-Americans’ ongoing shift to the political right, you’re in luck. Andrew O’Hehir provided that and much else in a Saturday piece for the liberal online magazine Salon.
While O’Hehir believes that the 1998 Northern Ireland peace deal was “unambiguously a good thing for the people of Ireland and their British next-door neighbors,” it had a downside stateside: “[T]he last connection between Irish-American identity and genuine history was severed…On one hand, Irishness [now] is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, ‘Celtic’ tattoos and vague New Age spirituality…On the other, it’s Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King…consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance. When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.”
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