In my last post I wrote about the challenges involved in forging, or excavating, a communitarian and leftist British patriotism. Here I go into more detail about the detachment of patriotism from ideas of the communal in the 1980s, and argue that this detachment makes Thatcherism less schizophrenic, and more grimly powerful, than some analysts…
Communitarian Patriotism: Obstacles to an Excavation
What happens when the only way of talking about something is to say it needs talking about? Brexit opened new fractures in the UK’s national culture but it also deepened existing ones. Since 2016 there’s been an unending chorus of voices calling for renewed attention to national identity. This conversation, supposedly so urgent, about Britishness…