The canniest political elites are able to lull their subjects into experiencing what George Orwell dubbed doublethink: “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In the contemporary political scene, a passive electorate is expected to swallow a) that the government, being a success, is naturally supported by some of the country’s most successful (i.e. richest) people and b) that same government is also the victim of persecution by powerful and envious vested interests.

So, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi–who treated the Italian premiership as though it were another title generated by his business empire–somehow got away with portraying himself as being on the side of the little man. To that end, he made much of his “persecution” at the hands of the over-mighty judiciary and sniping media. (Choosing the latter as a target showed incredible chutzpah).

Similarly, as Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? has shown, in the United States Republican strategists leveraged contempt of “East Coast liberals” to persuade blue collar voters to put into power pols dedicated to advancing the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of virtually everyone else several hundred rungs down the income ladder.

And in Ireland we have Fianna F�il. It is the party of the “men in the mohair suits”, Charlie Haughey and his Charvet shirts, and the infamous tent at the Galway Races, where property developers, builders, and tax dodgers (frequently one and the same person) schmooze with FF politicians (who are also frequently property developers, builders, and tax dodgers).

Yet despite shackling itself openly to the interests of the top decentile, FF is apparently seen by the Irish public as composed as ordinary daycent “skins,” whose success is resented by a sneering clerisy of “D4” (that tired pejorative) meeja types, barristers, middle-class planners, and deracinated cynics.

The success of this doublethink strategy has been powerfully demonstrated by recent polls, which indicate that the revelations about Bertie Ahern accepting loans and gifts from a floating body of friends and well-wishers has not only failed to dent FF support but has actually boosted it.

And yet some journalists not only fail to expose this political paradox–they actively bolster the myth. For the second time in as many weeks, I point to John Waters’s Irish Times column more in sorrow than in anger. In Monday’s column, with his typically hyperbolic swagger, he claims

“The people have warmed anew to Bertie because there has been something in this story that reveal him as a larger–i.e. more real–man than they believed. Reality comprises more than what journalists call “ethics””

This sort of sophistry–the verbal equivalent of a judo throw that coopts an opponent’s lunge–wouldn’t go amiss in a cumman gathering of FF diehards. Yet this resort to populism–as if “ethics” were an Anglo-Saxon fixation alien to the plain people of Ireland–often has an ugly underbelly.

And elsewhere, Waters froths that “The sole font of political morality resides in the hearts of the people.”

This line, with its sinister echoes of de Toqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” smells to high heaven. It is even possible to image it delivered from a floodlit podium, with each word met by cheers from the shadowy masses.