THE LAST BATCH OF WOGS ALWAYS OPPOSES THE NEXT:

At some point since 2000, I noticed that the right-wing chorus pontificating from screens in bars and shops was filled by men with names like Hannity, O'Reilly, and Buchanan. Nobody else seemed to care, so I let it go as one of those oddities that interested only me.

Then came Bannon's ascension as Trump's eminence grise , and it seemed impossible to ignore. This can't be accidental. Why have these white men come to the fore, rather than a more multicultural Catholic cohort --a Pole, an Italian, a German, and so on?

The origins of the sneering, baiting, biting style of O'Reilly et al are obvious. All of them can be traced to Joe McCarthy's rise to stardom, propelled by his gift for lurid innuendo and theatrical outrage. He set the precedent for a paranoiac ethno-populism that equates conventional power elites with treasonous conspiracy, much as Robert Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, labeled President Eisenhower a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy" and the "Birther" movement insisted President Obama was a Kenyan Muslim infiltrator.

One thing you can say for McCarthy, however, is that he avoided attacking specific races and religions. His epigones have changed all that, beginning with Pat Buchanan, McCarthy's self-designated successor, as he makes clear in Right From the Beginning , his 1988 memoir.

At the Republican convention in 1992, Buchanan called for a "culture war" and it was pretty evident who was in his sights. Ever since, he has trafficked in barely veiled racism and anti-Semitism.

The next stage came when the O'Reilly Factor premiered on Fox News in 1996, followed in the 2000s by Sean Hannity's various shows. Until his defrocking last spring, O'Reilly had a fabulous career as a beady-eyed Grand Inquisitor. Beefy Hannity, in contrast, is the runner-up in viewership, but Trump's closest ally among the reactionary pundits.

Collectively, these men couldn't be more different from the proverbial grace of the old Irish American liberals like Tip O'Neill, full of poetic allusions and noble ideals. What motivates them is a passionate antipathy to the "liberals" who destroyed the America of the 1940s and 50s.

That vanished world created space for their fathers and uncles to achieve a modest prosperity, and it's worth remembering how hard-won material success and social respectability was for the Irish.

Although they built enclaves of ethnic political power back in the nineteenth century, well into the post-World War II era they remained outsiders in the Ivy League, the State Department, or the White House.

By the 1960s, however, Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, had finally made it and become fully "white," a long process indeed. Having fought their way to full inclusion, many were intent on pulling up the drawbridge.

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