Mr. Dougherty recounts how, on the way to becoming a father himself, he reconnected with his mothers Irish nationalism the rebel songs, the Irish language, and the history of his fathers homeland.The book shows the appeal of political nationalism to young people who feel marooned at the end of history. The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. Its all a stew of stuff. So lets begin with a big question. When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. Granted, such a view may seem impracticable, as empire now seems to be the only alternative to nation, and empires (like Rome) swallow up nations before eventually breaking apart. Donald Trump is a huge figure, a Titanic figure in our culture. I actually think this is a huge problem for both parties going forward because the numbers are pretty forbidding on the federal budget as far as debt, interest payments, our previous commitments, our military budget. How do we avoid all the sins that usually attend nationalismresentment, xenophobia, and enervating nostalgia? Hes brought in people that were skeptical of the Covid era guidelines. This is disgusting. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rog Karma and Kristin Lin. I think being majority leader in such a slim majority, he doesnt have the institutional polar weight that Nancy Pelosi had in her party to keep things running smoothly. He covers religion and other issues forThe American Conservative. Because, in a way, I have a little bit of trouble buying this. Maybe you can make a case that the last spending bill that Biden passed, that I think Donald Trump would have passed if he were president, too something like it contributed a little bit more. The American Ideas Institute is a nonprofit, non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization based in Washington, D.C. 2022 The American Conservative, a publication of The American Ideas Institute. This ferment was accompanied by radical new theologies around the Mass. But Fox News had cut away. Mum and Dad met up at long intervals, most memorably when little Michael was five years old and they visited County Clare and the Aran Islands. I mean, theres a Republican autopsy in 2012, where they start thinking about needing to appeal more to multiethnic voters and change the nature of their coalition. Let me offer a contrary thought to that that goes back to your very first answer to me, which is that the Republican Party is not the Democratic Party. He thinks the primary aim of education should be to drench young people in their history and heritage. So that Im kind of hopeful for, that elected Republican legislators will have a little bit more to say about legislation, even if its not going to go anywhere in the next two years. They believed their revolution had been stalled in 1968 when Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, affirming the churchs opposition to artificial contraception, and then put it on ice in 1978 with the election of Pope John Paul II. Ours is an America vulnerable to assaults from a cynical, anti-patriarchal chronological snobbery, as C.S. Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year. He explains: This myth of liberation was like a solvent that had slowly and inexorably dissolved any sense of obligation in life. 2023 Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. I am indebted to him for the many sacrifices he made on my behalf, and the focused, intentional efforts he made to communicate to me masculinity, Christianity, and patriotism. Its a weird thing to me about Republicans, particularly given Donald Trumps constant obsession with winning and turning that into the only thing you need to be in life, that it isnt seen as more of an obvious vulnerability or even disqualifier for him that hes such a modest electoral performer, whereas there are Republicans who, apparently in these terrible rigged elections, win by overwhelming margins even so. It wasnt a mere translation into the modern vernacular; less than 20 percent of the Latin Mass survived into the new. This is a thankless job. I sit in on focus groups. Where the new faith is practiced with a zealous spirit as in Germany now bishops and priests want to conform the religions teaching to the moral norms of the nonbelieving society around them. Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review and a visiting fellow for the social, cultural and constitutional studies division at the American Enterprise Institute, is the. How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works, How Liberals Yes, Liberals Are Hobbling Government. This book covers a lot of subjects: fatherhood and its absence; motherhood, unnoticed and undervalued; consumerism; the Catholic faith; poetry and politics; authenticity; revolution; the meaning of sacrifice. [LAUGHS]. michael brendan dougherty fordham - volat-publicite.com Michael completed his education at Fordham University, with his major in History passing out in 2003. And I am declaring very early that I think DeSantis is a special figure in the Republican Party right now. As a college athlete, Penders played both basketball and baseball for the University of Connecticut, and is one of the few players to have competed in both the NCAA tournament as well as the College World Series. I mean that both as a punt for a very complex question, but as a good starting point, which is I view the Republican Party as a coalition of voters who, for whatever reason, object to Democratic rule. And what was so funny was on Fox News, they didnt even show the whole speech live. But then Dad got married to a. Irish girl, and when he told Michael and Mum that the new wife was expecting a baby, that just tore it. And I think that is what puts him so far ahead of a Brian Kemp or Greg Abbott in these past couple of years, and why hes polling as high as he is. But it is a different party. (See my discussion of the movie and the book here.) My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Sons Search for Home, By Michael Brendan Dougherty, Sentinel, April 2019, 240 pages. And I actually think this is a mistake. It has hardly reckoned with its under-performances in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. We get a lot of these. And so Democrats got what they wanted out of the deal or liberal-leaning voters on immigration got what they wanted out of the deal amnesty and Republicans were left holding the bag. Lets start with this about Ron DeSantis, because I think my audience probably mostly gets Ron DeSantis filtered through more liberal media and then also filtered through stunts and messaging Ron DeSantis does to provoke them. I think Dougherty, whatever his Irish predilections, knows this truth. And then the enforcement never really came or kind of fell apart over time. The study of literature no longer animates students' minds and souls. Anyone can read what you share. So I think thats another thing to look at. In the years after Pope Benedict liberalized the old rite, parishes began to bring back the mystical tones of Gregorian chant, the sacred polyphony written by long-dead composers like Orlando Lassus and Thomas Tallis as well as contemporary composers like Nicholas Wilton and David Hughes. For those of us who travel long distances to participate in it, its perseverance is a religious duty. Do Republicans actually have to have views on these issues anymore to be successful within their own party? Michael Brendan Dougherty: Pope Francis is a humble man, but a terrible And that eventually leads them to Joe Biden, this candidate who most factions of the party feel is fine. He admires and then imitates his mothers efforts to learn Gaelic through cassette tapes and language camps. It is also front and center in former TAC editor Michael Brendan Doughertys new book, My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Sons Search for Home. So people will credit him with the hot economy. The Dalrymple quote, when I first read it several years ago, formed a Hi Peter,Yes, I did read the Moondoggie text. This is partly because Dougherty has a compact subject at hand to criticize Ireland even though hes really talking about degeneracy in Europe and the West in general. That is to say, the author indirectly denounced the collapse of traditional moral values by meditating upon his own upbringing. How do you understand who Kevin McCarthy is and what kind of speaker hes likely to be? Youre not describing really a party structure where there are people who have influence and can chart a course. But this idea that theres nobody to call on the Republican side. And then youve seen during the Covid era, people that were skeptical of lockdowns or anti-vaxxers that were associated with the left coming into the Republican Party on the other side. In the early 1960s, Valerie had a one-night stand in San Francisco with playwright Brendan Behan, who was doing a wrap party for his play The Hostage. So I think it is different proportions, and so it is different people. But Trump just works with these passions. Chris Sununu won New Hampshire, which is a much more purple state a closer state than Florida is by 16 points. Dougherty (or MBD, as many TAC readers know him) is the product of an Irishman and an American woman. At one point he tells us his mother sent him to a Catholic school where he wore a uniform of grey trousers and maroon necktie, but he doesnt let us know whether this was an independent, private school, or just a local parochial one. An acquaintance of mine turned down an appointment as ambassador to Ireland early in the Trump administration, because while he and his wife were measuring drapes at the Phoenix Park ambassadors residence, they realized there was far too much anti-Trump flak and hatred coming from the press and RTE. But it ended up coming out much larger than that. But if you have to work with the rest of the system and the other party, but you and your media establishment made the other party too toxic to work with, its too easy to take you apart in a primary, as happened with the Tea Party and then happened around Donald Trump, if youre seen as too much of a compromiser. Such shallowness was hard to avoid during the 1990s. And the problem goes back to this problem of the Republican Party not knowing its own voter base very well. And yeah, he has that fantasy power of, hey, a businessman was in charge. This is mini-Trump. I know of only one equivalent story in nonfiction, and thats in the memoir by Ernest Hemingways daughter-in-law and sometime secretary, Valerie Danby-Smith Hemingway (, , 2004).