In the February issue of the Irish-based magazine,  Position Papers, a review of Vandalising Ireland by historian and writer Eoin Lenihan was published. It was a kind of ‘call to arms’ in defence of an authentic Irish identity and nationhood. We might wish him luck. As the reviewer, Dr Tim O’Sullivan, implied, the sometimes sneering reception of the book in the mainstream media spoke volumes about the kind of culture-war vandalism Lenihan was calling out.

Sadly, those who treasure Ireland’s 3,000+ years of history and identity are a very despondent lot in contemporary Ireland—nor is there anyone in the present political or cultural landscape who looks remotely like a serious influence to counter the abysmal and destructive drift our nation is experiencing.

But it is not just a local issue confined to one nation’s historical heritage. It is a question of one nation or people being subsumed in an identity whose skewed values are poisoning and are pervading the dominant elites of Western civilisation.

In this platform some years ago, the point of view was advanced, admittedly not very original, that the Irish State could be seen as the 51st State of the American Union. What was new in that designation is that it was described as a politically very deep-blue state. Matters have got much worse in terms of our allegiance to the decadent progressivism of deep-blue US polities since that particular essay was posted.

The deep moral vacuum we see in Ireland today does nothing else but mirror the vacuum alarmingly described by a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, in a recent essay on the prospects for his country. He is not the only worried NYT columnist. Even the more left-leaning Ezra Klein is worried about it in the context of the compulsive power now being wielded by the dubious actors driving the runaway technological revolution, unimpeded by any restraining democratic agency. He articulated those concerns in a recent podcast discussion with a law professor and a prominent science-fiction writer.

Klein and his interlocutors, in the light of the plague of “Ragebait, Sponcon” (short for sponsored content), “A.I. slop”, asked what happened to the internet of 2026 “which makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago”. What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly happened to make it go so badly wrong? They rather hopelessly scratched their heads wondering what kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives more meaningful again.

They did not really have an answer.

The liberal-progressivist Matthew Yglesias takes issue, of course, with both these men searching for a better way forward—or a way back from a cliff, as they see it—to a more contented society. Yglesias thinks their concerns are bogus.

He sums up his rubbishing of their concerns in this way:

On December 7, for example, Ezra Klein linked his growing concern with the amount of time people spend on compulsive online scrolling with Michael Sandel’s longstanding communitarian critique of liberalism.

Michael Sandel is a Harvard political philosophy professor, recognised as one of the most influential modern-day political philosophers who has railed against what he considers the poisoning of US politics.

Yglesias continued by attacking Ross Douthat for touting an old reactionary critique of liberalism—“that what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie”—(that view) has “garnered new force in the last two decades because of a very specific interaction between technological change and libertarian values”.

Douthat takes his worries to an even more fundamental level than Klein. He goes straight for the jugular in his analysis and tentatively suggests an escape route from what he essentially sees as an existential dead end.

His core concern is what he describes as “the triumph of vice in American life”. He is not just talking about the moral hell-hole which swallowed up Jeffrey Epstein and his knowing associates. Douthat is talking about something much more pervasive.

The triumph of vice in American life—the haze of marijuana in our cities, the gambling apps pulsing in so many young male pockets, the success of OnlyFans layered atop the ubiquity of online porn—happened gradually and suddenly. Gradually in the sense that there was no one Supreme Court decision that made all the difference, no single presidential election that turned on legal pot or legal porn. Suddenly in the sense that a convergence of forces, legal and cultural and technological, had a turbocharging effect over just the past 10 years.

The denial of this decadent progression by left liberals like Yglesias has resulted in conservatives declaring the end of meaningful liberalism and the emergence of a new embryonic post-liberal society. Douthat challenges attempts, like that of Yglesias, to justify the old liberal philosophy and its political outcomes. Douthat unpicks the fallacy of Yglesias’s philosophy. The fact that liberal governments are obliged to “treat citizens as if they are atomised individuals”, Yglesias wrote, does not mean “that people should, in fact, be atomised individuals”. The liberal order allows for myriad social cures for hyper-individualism, all kinds of private sources of morality and meaning. It just does not impose a single one-size-fits-all model, because that way lies tyranny.

All of which seems to sum up why liberal progressivism is nothing less than a formula for utter moral and social chaos. The tyranny he imagines coming from conservative values bears no comparison with the tyranny of the ‘woke’ culture which gave us wholesale cancellation of any who dared to question their conventional wisdom.

Douthat continues: “I think that vice clarifies some ways in which this theory is naïve. In any society, politics is an arena for debates about the good life. The way the government taxes and spends and bans and regulates has a powerful effect on the behaviour of its citizens, and what the law allows or forbids has some effect—not decisive, but inevitably influential—on what ordinary people think and do. So if the law and the political theory underneath it treat people like atomised individuals, well, then people will inevitably behave more like atomised individuals, conceive of themselves more like atomised individuals and experience the ills of atomisation more acutely.”

He maintains that this is clearly part of what has happened with gambling and drugs and pornography. As our laws have become less moralistic and more libertarian, addictive behaviours have increased. An amoral understanding of liberalism has yielded, in a pretty direct way, to a more immoral society. . . .

He quotes Aaron Renn in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal, who argues that in the US context it is fundamentally about the decline of Protestant Christianity as the core worldview in American life. That institutionalised generic Protestantism worked within and through liberal institutions before collapsing from the 1960s onward—which was when some kind of hell broke loose over a few generations, while complacent ‘boomers’ of the post-war generation complacently looked on.

Douthat feels that it is here that the stronger forms of religiously minded post-liberalism make their case, whether Catholic or Protestant. They argue that American liberalism was able to restrain vice only because of its religious inheritance; the secularising aspects of the liberal order have destroyed that inheritance; and so only an explicitly Christian politics that repudiates liberalism can restore the moral order.

But he is tentative about that. “If I had the answer,” he says, “I wouldn’t write so many open-ended newsletters on this subject (while urging my fellow Americans toward religion every chance I get).” That is a reference to his important recent bestseller, Believe.

So where does this leave Ireland? David Quinn’s (Irish Independent, 1 February 2026) unpicking of the cultural and religious travesty of the Irish State’s interpretation of the life and meaning of the country’s second patron, St Brigid, shows exactly where the country is going—straight into the abyss of post-Christian nothingness.

This is the legacy which Ireland’s pseudo-nationalist elite, installed firmly but hopefully not permanently in our political institutions and public service, is deliberately trying to bequeath to our country and people.

“Saint Brigid, we are informed,” Quinn wrote, was an “activist, healer and peacemaker”. We are shown images of suffragettes. We see pro-choice campaigner Ailbhe Smyth. We see activists holding up placards saying, “No banning family planning.” We see people celebrating in Dublin Castle the day the result of the same-sex marriage referendum was announced. We see a woman in a brightly coloured dress standing outside a church with a banner behind her opposing fracking. For some reason, the church is in Lagos, Nigeria. . . .

Far from the feminine being written out of history, what is happening now is that Christianity is being written out of Brigid’s story, and out of Ireland’s story, Quinn concluded.

Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor, attempted to reverse the decrees of his predecessor, Constantine, and restore the pagan gods as the moving spirits of the Empire. He failed miserably and died miserably on a battlefield somewhere in Asia. 

But we live in hope, indeed in Hope.  There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.