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Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times and the Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His most recent book is The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism.
 (July 2020)

Follow Fintan O’Toole on Twitter: @fotoole.

IN THE REVIEW

Unpresidented

Donald Trump walking past riot police in Lafayette Park during protests following the police killing of George Floyd, Washington, D.C., June 2020

The US has engaged in many armed conflicts, but three of them have never ended: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror. Their toxic residues flow from different directions into the current breakdown of the American polity.

Vector in Chief

Trump returns to what has worked for him before. As the cost of his terrible failures of public duty and common decency becomes ever more starkly evident, he will revert in his reelection campaign to an explanation of the disaster, not as a consequence of his own incompetence and contempt but as a punishment inflicted on the United States for its failure to build his wall, keep out foreigners, and crush the enemy within.

An Outside Chance

Bernie Sanders; drawing by Anders Nilsen

Bernie Sanders has never, as Ronald Reagan did in his famous ads in 1984, said a cheery good morning to America. He has been saying, over and over, We’re. Not. Crazy. Or, as he puts it more flatly in Outsider in the White House, “The ideas I was espousing were not ‘far out’ or ‘fringe.’ Frankly, they were ‘mainstream.’” In an era when “mainstream” is a favored term of political abuse, Sanders may be the last major politician to want—indeed to need—to embrace it.

Whatever He Wants

Even in a cynical pursuit of political advantage, the Republicans might have maintained the form of a real trial (scrutiny of verbal and written evidence) without its substance (a genuine weighing of guilt and innocence). They decided instead to have neither the form nor the substance. Because the Senate’s proceedings do not look much like a trial, its declaration of Trump’s innocence on both charges will not look much like a vindication. Whatever Chief Justice John Roberts would like to imagine, the Republicans are not even bothering to keep up appearances.

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How Brexit Broke Up Britain

A sticker reading

There is overwhelming evidence that the English people who voted for Brexit do not, on the whole, care about the United Kingdom and in particular that part of it called Northern Ireland. Asked whether “the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit, fully 83 percent of Leave voters and 73 percent of Conservative voters in England agree that it is. So, while the people who voted for Brexit are waving goodbye to the United Kingdom, Theresa May—with, in this, the support of Corbyn’s Labour—has vowed to “always fight to strengthen and sustain this precious, precious Union.” Brexit cannot be properly articulated because it has made a sacred cause of fighting for the very thing Brexit voters don’t care about.

How Ulster Unionists Block Brexit

Party leader Arlene Foster addressing the November 2017 conference of the Democratic Unionist Party as delegates waved Union and Ulster flags, Belfast, Northern Ireland

As the recent debate on abortion showed, the Democratic Unionist Party’s values and idea of Britishness are increasingly out of kilter with Britain itself. And Brexit, which the DUP supported, now looms as a disaster for the Northern Irish party. If, as the DUP insists, Northern Ireland can be treated no differently from the rest of the UK, because the Union with England, Wales, and Scotland is sacrosanct, then all of the UK must stay within the EU’s rules to meet European conditions on border arrangements with Ireland. In which case, Brexit itself becomes pointless. The DUP’s backward-looking Britishness thus stands solidly in the way of Brexit’s English revolution.

Theresa May’s Blue Monday

British Prime Minister Theresa May in Downing Street, London, December 5

Britain’s agreement to accept Ireland’s demands over Brexit and the border is an expression of its weakness: it can’t even bully little Ireland anymore. And this would have been bad enough for one day. But there was another humiliation in store. Having backed down, May was then peremptorily informed by her DUP coalition partner that she was not even allowed to back down. It is a scarcely credible position for a once great state to find itself in: its leader does not even have the power to conduct a dignified retreat.

Britain: The End of a Fantasy

British Prime Minister Theresa May on her way to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen's permission to form a minority government, London, June 9, 2017

Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. Because Theresa May doesn’t actually believe in Brexit, she’s improvising a way forward very roughly sketched out by other people. In Britain’s recent election, May’s phony populism came up against the Labour party’s more genuine brand of anti-establishment radicalism that convinced the young and the marginalized that they had something to come out and vote for.

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