Louise O'Neill on US election: If America sneezed, Ireland was likely to catch a cold

— the Trump presidency legitimised something so dark, and that darkness cast its shadow here too

Louise O'Neill: It’s been so unsettling to see the disarray of the last four years. Picture: Miki Barlok

I went to bed the night of the 2016 Election feeling confident that Hillary Clinton would win.

How could she not? Trump’s campaign had been characterised by racism; there had been several credible allegations of sexual assault against him; and it was clear that Hillary was not only his intellectual superior, she was far better suited to the role, temperament wise.

But that same night — and I’m aware this is going to sound far-fetched — I had a dream that Hillary was running a race and she finished in third place. She stood there, her face covered in dirt, and she said, “I did my best".

I grabbed my phone when I awoke, still confident I was about to see the words ‘First Female President’. I was in shock for the first minute, staring at the screen, and then I burst into tears. I cried for most of that day and my father, who’d tried to comfort me and failed, finally said:  "He’s not going to be your President.”

I was reminded of that conversation again this week when all anyone could talk about was the American election. Op-eds and memes shared in my Whatsapp groups, You’re Fired! trending on Twitter. Bleary-eyed faces on Instagram admitting to staying up all night to watch CNN’s coverage. One of my closest American friends texted at 5am, panicking, and I texted back, “He has Arizona! He just needs to win two of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania”, and then I thought to myself, 'how strange. I wonder if she even knows the Taoiseach’s name?'.

That’s the question trolls have been throwing at any Irish journalist or public figure who dared to express an opinion about American politics this week. Why do you care? Where’s the passion when it comes to what’s happening in our own country? 

It’s a magnificent piece of whataboutery — we have the capacity to care about more than one thing at a time. And ultimately, there are many reasons why we might want to pay close attention to the American presidential election. Firstly, if you have a modicum of empathy at all, it’s devastating to see the fear Trump instilled in immigrants, Muslims, and the LGBTQIA community. For survivors of sexual abuse, it is re-traumatising to see a man in a position of such power who has 26 accusations of sexual assault or harassment. For anyone concerned with climate change, it was deeply worrying that the so-called Leader of the Free World denied science and formally withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement, an attempt to manage the increase in global temperatures.

From an Irish perspective, we have had always had a fascination with the States. I’ve often wondered if it was a subconscious post-colonial rejection of the English that made us look West instead. 

We’ve consumed their pop culture, particularly film and TV, for so long; there’s a reason why many of our teenagers began speaking with a faint mid-Atlantic twang rather than attempting a cockney accent. The allure of the ‘American cousins’, and how sophisticated we thought them, even if they were living in some godforsaken suburb in the Mid-West that was no-more glamorous than Naas. If something started in the States, you were likely to see some iteration of it here within five years. For better or worse, if America sneezed, Ireland was likely to catch a cold.

That’s why it’s been so unsettling to see the disarray of the last four years, to see a nation that we have been told, over and over again, is the greatest in the world, eat its own tail.

The reality is that America was never the greatest nation: any state that was founded on a set of ideals including liberty and equality and was then built on the back of slaves was always destined to have a crisis of identity at some point. And it has failed for many years to address its deep-rooted issues with structural racism — dismissing the idea of paying reparations to African-Americans as nonsensical rather than a necessity for true healing. But for those of us watching here, it’s easier to dismiss the US as corrupt and broken than to look at what has been seeded in our own country over the last four years. The Trump presidency legitimised something so dark, and that darkness has cast its shadow here too.

The rise of right-wing politics, disguised as a fight for ‘freedom’, the tricolour waved at marches protesting the lockdown and mandatory masks. The Venn Diagram between those attending the anti-mask marches and those who are anti-immigration, anti-Black Lives Matter, and virulently anti-choice would be an illuminating one, and when you listen to the rhetoric spouted by the attendees, you can almost hear them falling down the rabbit hole of alt-right YouTubers, parroting the arguments of whatever Fox News pundit they’ve listened to that day. 

That is why Irish people cared about Joe Biden winning this election. Because we hope that if America fights for its soul, if America prioritises decency and compassion and character, we’ll see echoes of that here too.

Louise Says

Watch: The Undoing. This drama on Sky Atlantic has all the things I want from a TV show — outrageously wealthy people in million-dollar homes wearing incredible clothes. (And a murder mystery!)

Listen: The Black and Irish podcast. This is a series of conversations about what it’s like to be a black person living in Ireland. Compelling and moving.

• Louise O'Neill's latest novel, After the Silence, is out now