Steve Bannon outside a New York City courthouse as he is indicted on fraud charges, September 8, 2022 (CBS)
Originally published by the Irish Times:
There has been a heated reaction to the recent statement of Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon about fomenting a right-wing putsch in Ireland and creating an “Irish Trump”.
But perhaps more interesting than his ambition is how Bannon’s views have been shaped by his Irish-American background – and what they tell us about the state of Irish America today.
Bannon has a larger-than-life biography, reinventing himself in Gatsby-like fashion – from naval officer to investment banker to Hollywood film producer to news media executive to Maga architect. But there is only rarely mention of his Irish-American roots. Like Jay Gatsby, he has elided his impoverished ethnic origins, while advancing what his former colleague Ben Shapiro called his “aggressive self-promotion” and “unending ambition”.
An Irish version of Bannon’s bio might start with his ancestors who arrived from Cork in the mid-20th century. It would certainly cover his experiences growing up in an Irish American-family in Norfolk, Virginia, and attending a Catholic military high school in Richmond. For some extra colour, it might relate the story of his brief marriage to his third wife, a former Rose of Tralee contestant from Limerick who admitted smuggling phones and drugs to her boyfriend in a Miami jail, struggled with addiction herself and was banned for life from Aer Lingus for air rage.
More mundane but perhaps more telling is Bannon’s self-description, during an interview with Bloomberg News in 2015: “I came from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.”
The comment is significant, as Bannon was emerging into public consciousness as a key Trump adviser. He was positioning himself as emblematic of a rightward journey in Irish America over the past 60 years.
For much of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Irish identity in the US evolved around the urban immigration experience, ethnic nationalism, Catholicism and political investment in the Democratic Party. By the mid-20th century, the cultural glue of this ethnic community came apart as Irish-Americans became middle-class suburbanites and appeared to assimilate into the white American mainstream.
Amid the national discord of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the unravelling of the New Deal coalition and sociopolitical upheavals surrounding race and civil rights, the ethnic strings tying Irish Americans to the Democratic Party were broken. Many Irish moved rightward.
The seismic political realignments of that period not only reshaped Irish American political culture and identities, they echo into the present, where they inflame the culture wars around abortion, immigration and much more. Irish-American voices from Pat Buchanan to Bill O’Reilly to Bannon himself have championed a populist politics of white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism.
The prominence of what has been termed the “alt-Irish” among right wing and white nationalist sectors of American politics and media has lent the culture wars a distinctively Irish tone. The Irish-American editor of Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, once said: “When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.”
Bannon mimics some of this belligerent Irish cosplay, but he is also a shrewd observer of what remains politically salient among the Irish in the US, at a time when they are commonly viewed as mainstream assimilated Americans. He has described the Trump movement as “people who punched out of the system and guys serving in the military, people who are the backbone of civil society in America, coaching little leagues, supporting the church, working-class Scotch-Irish in the South and blue-collar Irish Catholics in Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan.”
Bannon was instrumental in Trump’s outreach and appeal to what he calls “Hammerhead Micks”. In this sense, the Irish Trump already exists.
