2 8 June 2017
I
N THE foyer collected a curious mix of tattooed
half-American lefties, millionaires, NAMA ref-
ugees, journalists, politicians and the plummy
denizens of Dalkey. Interestingly there did not
seem to be a presence from Ireland’s hard left
or even soft left, though Eamon Ryan was there.
What they were there for, surprisingly, was Sen-
ator Bernie Sanders, recent Democratic
Presidential candidate, on his first ever visit to Ire-
land speaking to the Dalkey Book Festival at the
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.
Tickets - €35 euro including a compulsory copy
of his book ‘Our Revolution, A Future to Believe In’
- had sold out in under five minutes, which was
quicker than Katy Perry’s gig at the theatre.
This was because attending this event was a Cul-
tural Statement for the Irish political classes.
What they were not there for (except the plummy
denizens) was David McWilliams but he was, pre-
dictably and essentially, oblivious to this. He
started proceedings with a lengthy, familiar and
unnecessary summary of the “magic” appeal of
Bernie but really it was about the magic of how
McWilliams and his entourage had enticed Sand-
ers off his tour of Britain to Dublin. McWilliams
(and Sanders) had been welcomed earlier to Áras
an Uachtaráin by President Michael D Higgins. This
made McWilliams proud. You sensed he feels pride
every time the President has him up.
Then like a ringmaster he summoned Bernie
from backstage and the audience rose to its feet.
Sanders is a brilliant speaker: never a word
astray, never dull, always passionate.
On occasion he did refer to the US as “this coun-
try”, some of the speech – about terrorism for
example – had been lifted from comments he must
have made to British audiences earlier in the week
and it was a little strange to hear an Irish audience
cheer to the rafters acknowledgements of national
political delinquency in another country, even if
the country is the US.
But Bernie is heroic and his talk was a joy to
behold, politically.
He opened with an excoriation of Trump’s poli
-
cies on climate change. He said Trump’s actions in
withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Accord
were “incredibly stupid and short-sighted and will
end up harming the American economy and the
world economy”. Trump’s claim that climate
McWilliams and
Sanders at the Bord
Gáis
by Michael Smith
The audience (except the
plummy denizens of Dalkey)
was not there for David
McWilliams but he was,
predictably and essentially,
oblivious to this
Not quite
feeling
the Bern
OPINION
Bernie takes to his feet
June 2017 2 9
change is a hoax is “dead wrong and not believed by the
majority of Americans”.
“How in God’s name do you make public policy in defi-
ance of science?” he thundered, to applause.
Trump was “lying through his teeth” when campaign
-
ing when he said he was on the side of the working class
and at this stage in the cycle was the least popular Presi-
dent in history. He’d duped the people into believing he
was on their side. Sanders said that 28 million Ameri-
cans do not have health insurance and Trump’s measures
would throw a further 23 million out of health cover.
Trump plans to cut $800bn from Medicaid, which helps
the poor, over the next decade and to defund Planned
Parenthood which serves the poor with abortion and
family-planning services, while, at the same time, pro-
viding a $300bn tax break to the wealthiest two percent
of Americans.
Trump’s Budget proposals are even worse, as he
wants to cut $2.5tr from programmes that help the poor
over the next decade while giving the same amount in
tax breaks to the top one percent. He said Trump’s
Budget proposals are “the ugliest and most destructive
attack” ever by an American President on the working
class, middle class, and poor people of America.
His most incisive attack was on those who think they
can champion equality in issues of feminism, abortion,
racism and homophobia while not addressing the issue
of the very richest, the 1%: of social inequality.
He let loose on the very richest, particularly in
America:
“The top one tenth of the top 1% has almost as much
wealth as the bottom 90%. 20 people in America own
more than the bottom half.
The richest 1 per cent of the world’s 7.3 bn people now
own as much as the rest of the world put together. Eight
men own the same wealth as the 3.6 bn people who
make up the poorest half of humanity.
After the Great Recession the total wealth owned by
the top 1% of the population in the US grew from 35% to
37%, and that owned by the top 20% of Americans grew
from 85% to 88%. 52% of all new income generated in
America goes to the top 1%. One family, the Walmart
Waltons, owns more than the bottom 42% of the Ameri-
can people. Under Trump’s proposals, that family would
get a $50bn tax break over a decade”.
It was blistering.
And statistical.
His most memorable attack was on the Democrat
party for not representing the disenfranchised, for wast-
ing time on fundraisers, for cultivating Wall St.
After an hour of rhetoric from Bernie, McWilliams ush-
ered him to a faux-livingroom set where he prodded him
with questions, each of which necessitated a McWil-
iams’ hand revolution, every answer generating furious
foppish nodding.
McWilliams lounged the smug lounge of the initiate,
head tilted in the general direction of Bernie at an angle
twenty degrees north of what anyone who doesn’t run
their own hedge fund would have adopted.
However, there was an appropriate response from one
of the world’s most people-attuned political practition-
ers: every time McWilliams asked a question from the
intimate bay of yellow-lamp-lit armchairs where he and
Bernie nestled, Bernie rose and addressed the audience,
his back to the great man.
Much worse than the optics of having an event for a
radical leftie pre-paid and over-priced for a bourgeois
book festival in a lavish amphitheatre that usually hosts
blockbuster musicals, was the misconstruction of Sand-
ers’ politics.
At one point McWilliams seemed to make common
purpose with Sanders, both being “people on the Centre
or Centre-Left”. But this is a failure of imagination. To
be clear: Bernie is on the radical left; McWilliams is a
clever analyst whose whole body of work has eschewed
a leftist, egalitarian or socialist perspective and is nota
-
ble for its smugness not its radicalism.
He did well to collar Sanders to appear at his festival
but sitting on twin armchairs and chaperoning him to the
Presidential Park do not make for a match of politics.
Between the analytical maestro and the international
hero of the left.
This event should have been chaired by Vincent
Browne or Claire Daly. Even Bernie, who apparently had
spent the day touring genealogy outputs with his and
the McWilliams families, mostly avoided radicalism:
even his pleas for equality centred on the 1%, the billion
-
aires, the only class of wealth not represented at the
event. Even when asked if he opposed Ireland’s offshore
tax facilitations he fudged, failing to note the single-
mindedness and egregiousness of our regime. None of
the questions was radical.
It should have been fleshed out that Bernie is Mr
Equality of Outcome; McWilliams and the furiously clap-
ping, and ovationing, southsiders are Mr and Mrs
Equality of Opportunity, which welcomes hedge funds.
There was a mismatch, which disembowelled the
event, the visit.
His most incisive attack was on those who
think they can champion equality in issues of
feminism, abortion, racism and homophobia
while not addressing the issue of the very richest,
the 1%: of social inequality
Everybody, with David

Loading

© 2015 Village Magazine

Back to Top