The New Left-Wing Patriot

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.