patriotism
27 Aug 2009
The New Left-Wing Patriot
Five years ago, Howard's version of Australia reigned supreme. Now the left must find its own national sentiment or it will be eclipsed again, writes Tim Soutphommasane
In recent years, progressives have rarely dared to speak approvingly of "patriotism", "citizenship", or "national values". Use such words and you are bound to be accused of employing euphemisms for chauvinism, assimilation and exclusion.Such is the cultural legacy of John Winston Howard. As prime minister, Howard mastered the technique of dog whistling. Speaking in a calibrated code, he appealed to voters' racial fears and cultural anxieties, perhaps most memorably in his election campaign launch speech in 2001: "We decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."
For many on the Australian liberal Left, no contemporary patriotism can be separated from dog whistle politics. A love of country is really just disguised racism. Yet such thinking is debilitating for progressive politics. Noting the role that patriotism can have as a dog whistle has become an excuse to vacate the arena when it comes to debates about values and identity. Progressives will need to get over this — and quickly.
The problem lies in the mindset that accompanies the idea of the dog whistle. In the first place, the idea draws on questionable assumptions about the use of race in our politics. It becomes all too easy to scan our body politic and pronounce that it is plagued by a cancer of racial prejudice and nastiness. The cause? Howard's ruthless opportunism: here was a prime minister who said it was alright for the primordial fears of white Australia to take over.
The mistake is to believe that this fear must count for the whole equation of national values. Blinded by their anger, many progressives failed to take Howard seriously enough. For all of his tactical cleverness and his indomitable will to power, Howard was driven by an ideological desire to overturn Paul Keating's project of national cultural reinvention. Yet the result of the dog whistle excuse was to encourage progressives to believe that any invocation of national values or social cohesion must stand for something more sinister — an agenda that dare not speak its name. All talk about national identity was potentially divisive and best avoided altogether.
There is a related problem with the dog whistle metaphor, which has to do with power. By regarding all conservative cultural politics as dog whistling, progressives paint themselves into a corner. The idea that the other side of politics communicates in code to the electorate, playing on some of its most basic and primitive anxieties about the nation, leaves you with little that you can do. The race card is the big trump of Australian politics; all you can do is fold.
Indeed, the mood among progressives at the height of the Howard years was one of complete demoralisation. People would talk about leaving Australia to escape a country that had turned its back on decency and tolerance. Australians who were already living abroad would talk about staying put until Howard was turfed out of office. Being an Australian in exile — one of "Howard's exiles", as someone once described it to me — was not just fashionable, it was a badge of honour.
The obvious danger with dog whistle paranoia is that the vocabulary of left liberalism can become built on disaffection. Public debates become less an opportunity for action and more an occasion for indulgent despair.
While despair can be a soothing palliative for idealists struck by political depression, it can never ultimately be a cure. At least not when it is unaccompanied by an effort to set things right and to provoke your compatriots into believing in your progressive version of the national project once again. What must be avoided is a despair that encourages you to become a spectator rather than an actor, to substitute fatalistic indifference for political commitment.
That type of malaise takes the power out of progressive politics. Thus weakened, being a progressive is no longer defined by membership of a collective project, defined by a positive agenda; it ends up defined by what you are standing against. This has been the case on matters of patriotism. Progressive Australians have been unable to claim ownership of national values, citizenship or solidarity because they have had no story of their own to offer.
Admittedly, patriotism is not, as a rule, popular among progressives. To identify with the progressive cause seems to mean you must also adopt a sceptical, if not hostile, attitude towards national pride and allegiance. Defeatism is a prerequisite of belonging to the left.
Thus in 1945 George Orwell wrote about the rampant Anglophobia among left-wing intellectuals in his country: "a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases". Even in the midst of World War II, many on the British left "could not help getting a kick out of seeing their own country humiliated". Writing of the USA in the 1990s, the philosopher Richard Rorty observed that leftists "associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities", namely, "the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War". Writing in France, critic Julia Kristeva has argued that French leftists believe "nationalism is in bad taste and patriotism downright trashy," and favour instead a vague cosmopolitanism.
Such suspicion of patriotism has been true as well in Australia. The late Donald Horne, for a long time the senior intellectual figure of Australian life, summed up this feeling in calling for a "civic faith" to replace our sense of national belonging. In Horne's view, any patriotic feeling bound up in the nation is dangerous because it inevitably appeals to an idea of ethnic unity and integrity. Entertaining Australian patriotism would indulge the old logic of preserving the British or Anglo-Saxon race and the rituals and the rhetoric, the stories and the slogans of patriotism would be placed in the service of that racial project.
It is understandable why progressives might disapprove of patriotism. The left-liberal or social democratic conscience is guided by what might be called soft values: compassion, equality, justice. Patriotism belongs to the family of hard values — duty, honour, glory — which, more often than not, attach themselves to war and military endeavour. One of the lines most frequently quoted on patriotism is that of the ancient Roman poet Horace: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
Thus understood, patriotic virtue appears to belong more to the language of conservatives than to the language of left-liberals or social democrats. Much of contemporary progressive thinking is defined by its universalism, the belief that our status as human beings has the most moral significance. One is a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of a city or country. We belong to the community of humanity. Whether in Sydney or Shanghai, in Melbourne or Mumbai, we are all entitled to be treated the same.
Patriotism does not, at first glance, accord with a progressive commitment to universal norms of reason and equality. Pride in one's nation resembles a passion of the blood rather than a product of calm deliberation. There seems no room to balance the call of patriotism against the rules of reason. In short, patriotism is not generally regarded as compatible with a left-liberal view of the world.
Yet it was not always so. In the Australian case, leftist politics has been profoundly shaped by a tradition of labourism and radical nationalism dating back to the late 19th century, in which social equality and political reform were understood as organic expressions of Australianness.
But this ideological tradition has been in retreat since the 1960s. Out of the countercultural forces unleashed by the Vietnam War, Australian leftist politics took a cosmopolitan turn. Influenced by social movements and identity politics, members of the left adopted more critical attitudes towards traditional expressions of national identity. Many would also say that an enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism and Asian engagement during the Keating years has led progressives to drift even further away from patriotism.
However, any contemporary progressive political agenda cannot succeed without patriotism. At the end of the day, democracy is the achievement of many people working together. It is about movements and campaigns, corralling votes and interests, acting in coalition with others. You may not agree with everyone about everything, but you will need to find common ground — you need to build bridges or you won't cross the river.
The point is that to be politically effective, you have to engage the minds of other citizens. At its most powerful, politics is a drama in which citizens are characters. You can never achieve anything by cutting yourself off from your own society or national community.
When it comes to crafting a story for citizens, it is a national story that carries the most weight. Our representatives do not address us as "fellow citizens of the world" or in Esperanto; they address us as fellow Australians, in our language, and address problems as those facing the Australian nation.
To deny patriotism, then, is a sure path to political impotence. This is especially so given how the language and perspective of middle Australia is charged with a warm affection for our country and its qualities. Most Australians view our country through a benign, patriotic lens.
Still, it is easy, too easy, to pathologise patriotism. As Ghassan Hage suggested in his book Against Paranoid Nationalism, patriotic sentiment can create "citizens who see threats everywhere" and a culture of callousness towards "the Other". In particular, Hage points to paranoia about outsiders based on racialised fantasies about Australian identity and culture. The psychology of patriotism becomes dominated by an intense "worrying" about the nation and the harmful impact of immigrants, Muslims in particular.
The mistake of believing that national patriotism has no place in a liberal society is two-fold. First, it denies that patriotism can assume a moderate and perfectly acceptable form, the sentiment most Australians possess. Second, and of most concern, it denies that the kinds of feelings of cultural loss associated with "worrying" are legitimate.
The problem here is that by tying all cultural expressions about the nation to a nasty nationalism, you can end up ignoring the concerns many people have about social cohesion and national identity. This kind of blithe dismissal of anxiety helped feed the emergence of Hansonism during the 1990s, and paved the way for the left-liberal capitulation to Howard over the last decade.
This is why anti-patriotism remains such a fundamental problem for progressives. By disavowing a love of country, they risk alienating themselves from the very citizens who need to be addressed and persuaded. You start removing the cover of assurance, the blanket of trust that public deliberation requires. Where you suggest to others that you don't share their concern for the nation, you leave yourself with no moral or political standing.
For too long, progressives have been content to cast patriotism as a form of psychological dysfunction. In fact patriotism is not the evil that many believe it to be. It can be an instrument of inclusion and progress. And it can drive an ambitious nation-building agenda. But recognising this requires a serious rethinking of progressive politics. It begins with discarding that shibboleth of respectable left-liberal thinking: the dog whistle excuse.
This is an edited extract from Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives (Cambridge University Press), which will be launched on 30 August at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
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It is all very well to speak gowingly of patriotism as Tim does, and say it is benign and ‘nation building’ but it only ever builds a nation for the loud and powerful, who then keep using this confected emotion to further cement their hegemony.
I realise this is an extract, but how about defining what you mean when you write of this benign nation building tool?
If it looks anything like flag draped goons, sports boofs, ‘love this flag or leave this country’ bumper sticker owners, if it is associated at all with connections to the Xtian God, if it requires salutes, military chaplains, Governors General, monarchs, medals, prayers of any variety, if it includes solemn drooped heads when a cannon fodder grunt is killed, or an appeal to ‘the national interest’ when a mine is to go in, if it even hints at ‘Australian values’, at our ‘unique nature’ at our ‘egalitarianism’ in the midst of a capitalist consumer nightmare… then leave me out please.
Like many authors, Tim ‘identifies’ a ‘problem’ and fails to supply an answer.
Simply urging ‘patriotism’ and warning against ‘dog whistles’ is too shallow. And a definition of what constitues anythign at all ‘leftwing’ in Australia is a must, because it is not the least bit clear that there is anything at all ‘left wing’ on offer in this country, only a mediocre form of middleclass liberalism, tinged at times with vaguely ‘religious’ overtones from our ultra pious politicians and some community ‘leaders’.
Patriotism moves like a fashion - a fad. Howard’s success wasn’t intrinsic. He was merely riding the wave of nationalistic sentiment caused by, firstly a radical restructuring of the economy, and secondly 9/11. The times suited him. In other contexts, a bloke like Howard would be regarded as a gibbering idiot, as he was during the 1980’s.
While right wing demagogues capitalise on patriotism when it suits them politically, behind the scenes they support companies that move capital to where taxes and labour costs are cheapest.
Nation states are a collective figment of the imagination - an illusion. Patriotism is a delusion. The left should never give into preying on people’s delusions (nor should anyone).
Having said that, the left has always cared about community, and the betterment of people in that community. It is almost part of the manifesto :-).
But problems are moving well beyond the nation-state (global warming, global movements of capital). The "community" is not only local, it is more global than it has ever been.
In this context, I don’t know that patriotism helps – or is even relevant.
Tim fails to mention another problem with the ‘dog whistle’ image. it suggests an incredible elitism - ie. that while many, perhaps most, Australian’s are susceptible to the dog whistle appeal, we progressives are immune.
barry.hindess
school of social sciences
Australian National university
barry.hindess
school of social sciences
Australian National university
Why do intelligent people continue to peddle the myth of nationalism and/or patriotism when a basic fact about life is that none of us pick the time or place we were born?
Why should I care for people just because they are from Australia, or why should I feel especially proud for living here? The only thing that makes me proud to be alive are the few maginative people who attempt to transcend their time and space. I do not care who these people are or where they come from.
Anyone with any working idea of grand science such as quantum physics will know that the true aim of humanity is to attain perception of timelessness, not to childishly identify people in a certain linear geographical space as united as one peoples.
Nationalism (and its cousins racism and ethnic/religious hatred) is the material, physical reaction to the attempt of the human mind to unite diverse contradictions within each of our imaginations. If one reads the great poets and philosophers of recent times such as Aldous Huxley and Albert Camus, you will realise that I am not creating this hypothesis.
Nationalism is much like money. A great symbolic fiction and swindle.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
In response to Barry, sadly, yes, it is pretty clear that for a range of reasons (he said generously) the vast bulk of our nation hears the right pitch on the whistle, and respond accordingly, aided and abetted by a largely dormant and poorly equipped media and equally dense politicians from all parties…. but especially so from those who purport to be ‘left wing’ while really enjoying their life as neo-libs, like Rudd, Beazley, Tanner, Latham, Faulkner, Carr (both of them) and all the rest of our underperformers on the ALP side.
And in response to Steve, in relation to his query, intelligent people do not support nationalism or patriotism.
I’m with Steve!
Who the Hell needs ‘patriotism’ in relation to an accidental birth place, one which gives me nothing politically and little culturally to be proud of.
And I am not being patriotic in saying that I love Australian ‘wide open spaces’, because they can be anywhere, where humans are the lesser.
The raving nationalism, ‘salute the flag’, ‘carry-the-gun’ patriotism of the USA is enough to make anyone with a brain vomit!
Huey or someone forbid that we would have to follow this mob of nutters.
And I do wish that JWHoward would quietly slip into the slime he created, and we never hear his voice of un-reason again. Enough is more than enough!
Well, I must say, I think I’m from the left. But for some reason I wanted Australia to win the Ashes; my sympathetic liberalness didn’t get in the way there.
This is a thought-provoking article.
If we take a long view of Australian national awareness, its early phase which informed the 1st Commonwealth (1901+) clearly included fear-based concerns about white (British) racial integrity and its security. Many of these fears were explicit in the constitution - and reinforced jingoistic nationalism.
Fortunately this national awareness matured over 70 years after World War 1 with increased non-Anglo migration; with higher overall levels of education; wider travel by young Australians; and in recognition and support for supra-national bodies like the UN, in the creation of which Australians like Evatt were actively involved. It was this wider maturity which later was revulsed and responded against and defeated Hansonism.
This evolving maturity will enable us to eventually make the normalising move to the 2nd Commonwealth (i.e. republic), despite the recent obstruction by monarchists like John Howard, who can delay but not prevent it.
Similar comments also apply to a national charter of rights - also noisily opposed by the same Howard in a speech this week. Our history will move on despite such reactionary wailing.
The wasted years of the Howard government were driven by the narrowness of his mind and his personal fears - including (still) of Asia, as exemplified by "we don’t have to choose between our history and our geography" as he tried to demolish the hated Keating strategies, by slashing funding of Asian languages studies.
Many senior Liberal Party people did display truly liberal values - dangerous to Howard, so usually eliminated in his purging of it into a Dry conservative party. He also showed plain contempt for multi-national authorities like the UN Security Council, in his defiant comfort with Bush/Blair in the Coalition of the Willing, and their disastrous Iraq war. His self-righteous prompting of "Australian Values" as if these were unique qualities of the Australian people was laughable - and did indeed polarise many values debates. If we are to utilise pride of nation in a constructive way, it needs to be in our recognition of universal humanist values, in our generous sacrifice in contributions to regional or international disasters (as happened for the Asian tsunami).
Our collective thrill at (watching) sporting success - and despair at defeat of our heroes - should be refound on both wider recognition of other nations’ successes (try and find them in our Olympic broadcasts) rather than a narrow Us-versus-them parochialism so demonstrated by Howard.
But Mr Soutphommasane makes a fair point about the need for our progressives to engage with those of differing views, rather than simply labelling ‘dog-whistle’ campaigns as beneath argument.
Patient and careful debate may be slow, but it does prove effective. The current example of the national consultation on a charter of rights is a good demonstration.
Geoff D Bolton
I wouldn’t be so rankled by the concepts "nationalism" and "patriotism" if it weren’t ultimately for the fact that nations are ideological artifices and totally arbitrary constructs. No matter how much historical value you attempt to impute the idea of a nation, you can’t escape the fact that nature recognizes nor deals with any such thing. [I don’t accept that animals instinctively defining social territory in any way correlates with the articulated human concept of the "nation" by the way.]
I was watching a documentary on herds of African wildlife migrating one day and the little kid I was watching it with asked a question, which, while making me laugh, also made me think: "Hey! How can these animals just go into all these countries whenever they like? Why don’t they have to pass border control?"
That’s not to say these concepts serve no useful function whatsoever, but on the other hand, let’s no get all carried away by fairytales.
http://zielwolf.blogspot.com
I see that "dog whistle politics" - which apparently is an Aussie donation to the broader world of political theory - is now regarded as so commonplace by social theorists that the current author feels it reuires no explanation or definition.
I hope he’s right, for his sake.
In one short article, he manages to use the term ‘dog whistle’ no less than seven times, incorporating it in such improbable phrases as::
- dog whistle politics
- dog whistle excuse
- dog whistle metaphor
- dog whistle paranoia
Then legendary sociologist Barry Hindess tops up our quota with "‘dog whistle’ image" and "dog whistle appeal".
That’s a lot of inaudible high-pitched screeching.
On the"can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em" principle, I I’ll call the theory that patriotism re-packaged offers salvation to the ‘left’ (whatever that may be these days) a KITTY LITTER theory.
In years to come, the phrase will probably be ubiquitous in high-power academic circles, so please note that (in all ) you encountered it first here, on NM.
Where else?
I think possibly the conclusion of the article has been left out because they want to release all the good bits at the writers festival…. seems obvious. From the comments it seems that releasing this excerpt has whetted some peoples appetites, and I imagine the hope is that you will buy/read the full text.
Of course countries are our invention but all countries are not the same. Can’t we be proud of what we have invented? It hasn’t been perfect, but still, it is good, isn’t it?
I think possibly the conclusion of the article has been left out because they want to release all the good bits at the writers festival…. seems obvious. From the comments it seems that releasing this excerpt has whetted some peoples appetites, and I imagine the hope is that you will buy/read the full text.
Of course countries are our invention but all countries are not the same. Can’t we be proud of what we have invented? It hasn’t been perfect, but still, it is good, isn’t it?
Kity litter: last refuge of the dog whistler!
Oh what strangled metaphor doth splash this sodden mulch!
tho still wrapped in cloth of colours three
to rage and splutter Oi! with glee
cast down your mask and pointing bones
and join your fellows, vested drones.
love, from a now returned exile
at the coalface of a country school
Tim Soutphommasane has written an erudite article which I’m still in the process of absorbing, along with the comments about it. I think he’s got something here, but I can’t quite get a handle on it. Howard and his allies escalated the culture wars (their term I believe) to a crescendo, and these battles are still in progress. We either fight it on their terms or on our own. One of the weapons is the use of language, so "we" need to define what words mean. For example, the use of Left and Right. The term Progressive has been substituted for Left in this discourse - much better. How about substituting Regressive or Neanderthal for Right. Why shouldn’t "conservative" but progressive people join the Liberal Party in droves and boot out the Regressive Neanderthal Idiots over time? Perhaps they need to join the Labour Party, which seems to have sold out to the Regressives during the 1980’s. I sense a certain desperation in the recent utterances of Howard (whom I fondly refer to as "the Poison Dwarf"), the Murdochs who are busy rent seeking and attacking the BBC as we know, and Costello’s attack on the ABC. The Regressives have bequeathed us Iraq, Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis and lots more. Even they, in their dark hours, know that their creed has failed. A wounded animal is doubly dangerous, but is nonetheless dying. Progressives need to destroy the Neo-classical economics on which the Regressives rely, deal harshly with the misdeeds of th Murdoch gutter press and take the battle to the enemy. I look on Tim’s article as one shot in the war, and a good one. Our problem is that we are nice people who don’t dish the dirt like the Regressives, but truth will out. Like others I’m not sure about playing the Nationalist card.
The problems that face our world are international and unless we want to retreat into a simplistic "nationalism" we must work with the world. The myths that underly nationalism are many. Take our myth of equality. We are now one of the least equal countries in the first world, or mateship which is anti women and the term "mate" can be used abusivley.I can understand the need to pull up the drawbridge but we will not escape the results of our own actions or those of the rest of the world. I think we should have a world flag and a world anthem and forgo simple nationalism.
Wow!
The Howard Haters are now the Liberal Left????
Hardly. There are only two true liberals and they are neither "Left" nor "Right".
Even John Howard cannot be categorised. How could a "Liberal" Party member, champion of the individual above the collective, be opposed to a Bill of Rights to protect an individual’s rights from heavy government, the very essence of omnipotent power. ????
A political journalist should learn that, unlike a true believer, a true patriot puts the people before the Party.