Martin Meenagh blog

  As often in the past three years, I am compiling my briefing notes for students in the intention of putting them online as a book. These are draft notes for one of this term's courses, copied from my main blog. Ireland is an old island which currently contains a young republic and a culturally divided area of British jurisdiction. Consequently, there is a great deal of ‘term shifting’ which goes on in descriptions of the place. Some people feel comfortable thinking in terms of counties, some in provinces, and some in geographical descriptions. Given the historic and current disputatiousness of the Irish, otherwise innocuous terms carry meanings; to call the country ‘Eire’ rather than ‘the Republic,’ to use the terms ‘the State’ or ‘The North’ is to make a conscious decision of which those outside of Ireland’s internal debates are often unaware. Some cities have three names, all of which, in the right circumstances, could start a fight. Paradoxically, however, the association of...

  Presidential election flaws before 2000. The Constitution of the United States prescribes that the president will be elected by a combination of popular vote and elite ‘filtering,’ normally though the electoral college, but in exceptional cases through the Congress. In 1788, The Federalist Papers (No 68) which was written to try to persuade and reassure New Yorkers of the sense of the Constitution, said that this process would ‘afford little opportunity to tumult and disorder’ and that it was a practical obstacle to ‘cabal, intrigue, and corruption.’ This model did not even hold for the first presidential election, as Alexander Hamilton intrigued behind the scenes to humiliate John Adams, who was nevertheless elected vice-president. Processes on paper run alongside regimes, the acceptable and perceived ways of doing things, in the minds and activities of the individuals and communities involved. This is especially true when processes are set out in a document as simple and ...

  Gary Hart was George McGovern’s campaign manager. A young Democrat in 1974, he ousted a serving Senator in Colorado, and embodied the new Democratic Party which had begun to emerge in the transparent, environmentally conscious technology- and policy-driven culture of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. He served on one of the most consequential committees in modern congressional history—the Church Committee—which investigated and contributed to the abortive reform of America’s Intelligence agencies. An ‘Atari Democrat’ who promoted the semiconductor industry, Hart merged new politics with a grasp of the primary process, and came very close to snatching the Democratic nomination from a former vice-president anointed by the party’s establishment. Hart was one of a number of Democrats elected in the wake of the oil price shocks and Watergate who formed a bridge to the neoliberal Democratic leadership Council without completely breaking with the past. Instead, politic...

    The Spanish American War, conducted across a little under four months in the Summer of 1898, has often been seen as the inauguration of he twentieth-century power of the United States. In this telling, the American media and administration, armed with a growing Navy, overwhelmed a decaying European power and established dominance in the Caribbean, associated itself with democratic movements in Cuba, and colonised the Philippines as the consequence of a form of republican Imperialism. This energised the American economy after the panic of 1893, and helped heal the wounds of the Civil War amongst white Americans. As so often with historical events, the commonly understood narrative is in itself a product of some of the contingent needs of tellers. The War could in fact be contextualised as the culmination of Gilded Age trends which speak as much to the past as the future. For example, both Secretary of State Blaine and President Harrison, in office between 1889 and 1893, wer...