Joe Biden and Ireland

Feeling that you have a home, that you are a link in a generational chain, and that your inherited history is a tale of heroism and success rather than disgrace and attenuation; most people need these things.

In his own life, Joe Biden has outsourced the location of these feelings from America to Ireland. In relation to America he has stated “folks like me who were of Caucasian, European descent… from 2017… will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” The video is linked above. He has made similar remarks on other occasions — he seems happy for people like him to fade into American history.

By comparison he feels a deep connection to Irish identity. He worries about Brexit’s effect on Northern Ireland. He quotes Seamus Heaney. He says Wolfe Tone (the father of Irish Nationalism) is his personal hero, and bats back press questions with a cry of “BBC? I’m Irish!”

There is a disconnect in Biden’s mind between the value of Irish ethnicity to Irish people, and the value of a white American identity to Americans. If you asked him he would explain the source of the disconnect is that America is a nation of immigrants and Ireland is not.

We’ll leave to one side the accuracy of the statement that America is a nation of immigrants. The phrase was popularised in the 1960s by the Anti-Defamation League via John F. Kennedy, which somewhat undermines the idea it was the country’s founding impulse and purpose.

If politics is downstream from culture, then global politics is downstream from American politics. Every half-baked idea that exists in American politics will eventually emerge in other western countries, regardless of whether the context exists to support it. Irish elites don’t say the phrase but their actions and preferences absolutely indicate that they think of Ireland as a nation of immigrants in the same way. There isn’t any indication that they believe there is a point at which accelerated demographic or cultural change is undesirable, and all of their public pronouncements and actions point in the opposite direction.

Joe Biden is from an important country and is a powerful person with respectable views who boasts of his connection to us. Irish politicians and media are flattered by this because it reminds them while our heritage might be a shabby thing to them, it is sometimes worth venerating because of it’s value to people who matter.

But this delight only extends to feeling good that an important person is paying homage to something you possess. There isn’t some psychological or cultural ring of steel around historic Irish identity that will protect and preserve it, or keep it vital. No one in a position to put such a thing in place would propose it. Change is the order of the day in Ireland and if in time that erases the things that give people like Joe a sense of meaning, no one in a powerful will be troubled by that.

Joe Biden is reviving interest in Irish American identity at the exact point when Irish elites have begun to question whether Irishness exists at all, and whether the existence of a historic Irish identity might not be merely embarrassing but also a bit racist. He can accept the diminution of white American identity because he believes there will always be a place where his own Irish ethnicity will be considered central and unproblematic. But will there be?