The Great Refusal: McDowell’s Ideological Long Game Against Maria Steen

I have had some thoughts on why some politicians relented from nominating Steen, even when it was obvious their votes would make the crucial difference.

The case of Michael McDowell is interesting. I would’ve expected McDowell would’ve nominated her as it got close, for reasons of fairness and giving a minority of the electorate a chance to express themselves. But on reflection, I think the reason why withheld so stubbornly is precisely because he wants this business of a “social conservative minority” to dissipate.

In most European countries if the question is asked “What are the priorities of a right-wing voter?”, the answer is probably that they care about immigration control or lower taxes or less regulation and red tape on business. That’s what McDowell is for. In Ireland there’s still a sense that a “right-wing voter” is a social conservative one, and that their priorities are abortion and gay marriage.

I think in McDowell’s eyes, the social conservative minority – which he knows still exists  and which pokes up as around 33% in referenda—would get a shot in the arm by Maria Steen being nominated. It’d ensure that these issues of abortion/LGBT/etc. are put back on the agenda and we go backwards into having endless debates about “moral matters”. McDowell, as a true liberal, simply wants this to end. The “conservative minority” simply needs to be absorbed into mainstream politics and there needs to be a liberal consensus. So a right-wing voter will be voting for sectional issues that aren’t abortion or social conservative matters.

So he knows he’s “denying” those social conservatives a vote, but he wants them to go and find live issues that they can vote on. He wants that social conservative base to be channelled elsewhere in normal left-right politics. Nominating Steen would ensure that this social conservative stuff drags on for another decade, when he thinks they’re defeated (in the referendums of the past decade) and they need to just accept that and move on. 

All Maria Steen represents is social conservatism—she doesn’t represent anything but conservatism, and a vote for her will be interpreted as that. It’d upset the applecart of the liberal consensus he wants to see solidify itself.

In that light, McDowell’s decision not to lend his name to Steen’s nomination wasn’t some quirk of temperament, nor even just a tactical calculation about her chances. It was an act of ideological discipline.

To nominate Steen would have been to re-legitimise a defeated minority and to keep alive a quarrel he wants settled. 

By refusing, he was sending a signal: the future of Irish politics lies in a left-right contest over economics, governance, and federalism, not in a re-litigation of social issues. For McDowell, shutting that door is not cruelty, but construction the deliberate shaping of a political landscape where his brand of neoliberalism is the only credible language of the right.