Boston Mayoral Election: Has Diversity Broken the Back of Irish America?

A glass ceiling was left shattered on the other side of the Atlantic this week with the triumph of Michelle Wu in the Boston Mayoral Election. A second generation Taiwanese American, Wu, who sits pretty on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, rode home with a hearty 64% of the vote against her opponent. Annissa Essaibi George, herself of Tunisian heritage.

While the result was in little doubt, the election was conspicuous in the absence of an Irish-American candidate in a city once near synonymous with the ethnic bloc. The fallout has led to progressives dancing on the grave of Irish America, praising yet another fallen stronghold in the long march towards a truly multicultural America.

While the race was preceded by the vacating of the seat by Matty Walsh to attend fellow Irish American Joe Biden’s cabinet as Secretary of Labour, even the preliminary elections saw no Irish-American candidate.

The New York Times was in typical form, ready to rub the salt in poor paddy’s wounds with an article lauding what Wu’s win heralds,

‘Time to retire the tired old tropes about Brahmin swells, Irish ward heelers and the petty parochialism that for too long has defined this city on the national stage”

Since 1884 and the election of Leeside’s Hugh O’Brien bar the very occasional Italian, the mayorship has been held by a near unbroken chain of Hibernians. The gem in a political constellation that stretched from the East Coast all the way to Daley’s Chicago, Irish-America is passing gently from nostalgia into full blown political extinction despite some legacy holdings. 

Unbeknownst to many in the Motherland, Boston has been a minority majority city since the late 90s, with the phenomenon of white flight and yuppification altering the very fabric of the city. 

The pubs that formerly played host to NORAID fundraisers are being retrofitted into hipster cafes. The Scylla and Charybdis of globalism, diversity and gentrification are squeezing the former Catholic ghettos into dissolution and out of the social ashes emerges a sanitised Boston, prime for its corporate masters and the bugman workforce that goes with it.

Commentators have rightly described Wu’s triumph as representing the muscling out of white working class electoral power. Buoyed on by an alliance of young professionals and minority voters, not even the Irish-American south side of Boston largely siding against Wu was able to stall her advance.

Source Map: See how every precinct voted in the Boston mayoral election | WBUR News ^

In retrospect, the harbinger for the Irish-American demographic downfall was marked in the notorious bussing scandal of the 1970s,  which saw the forced desegregation of Irish areas at effective gunpoint leading to low level rioting. 

Spearheaded by Senator Edward Kennedy, the saga reached a violent peak when Irish-American gangster Whitey Bulger firebombed the birthplace of the Kennedy family. It was to no avail, with the desegregation acting to break the back on Irish-American power in the American North-East.

The cultural theorist E. Michael Jones has documented at tragic length the manner in which Catholic political power was smashed in the late 20th century, through a process of racialised social engineering, deracination through the suburbs and secularisation. 

Though a general ethnic changing of the guard is to be expected in a society like America, the demographic war waged against American Catholics was no accident.

While an Irishman however geriatric sits in the Oval Office we are witnessing the passing of Irish American power politics. A diaspora that rose up the ranks through political grit and sheer numeracy to hold sway over a key aspect of Pax Americana is being displaced by a wider demographic bonfire that is consuming America as a whole.

By producing such feckless playboys as the Kennedys or not properly asserting itself from the 60s onward, Irish America scripted its own death. Biden’s tenure is not a second coming of Irish-America, but its political swansong, holding the door open for a wider demographic shift that spells the end of the American Republic as an unified polity.

We have our own Michelle Wu closer home in the form of Dawson Street’s Hazel Chu, herself positing the same post-Irish worldview as the new incumbent in Boston city hall. Boston acts as a parable for the end goal of multiculturalism in dissolving anchored societies in favour of social chaos more tractable to the whims of progressive elites who inherit the detritus.

Famously, twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job we had the presidency, a generation later we handed over the keys to the palace. At this juncture, preparations should be made to facilitate the more ethnically conscious aspects of our diaspora ready and willing to eject themselves from the American Dream as the demographic curtains really begin to fall. 

While the Irish may not carry the same sway over the city, there is no reason we cannot have a proactive network just in time to profit during a potential balkanisation of America.

Don’t cry for Boston, but certainly don’t let Dublin follow it into the night.