An Evening with John O’Sullivan

Next Quadrant dinner: Wednesday, April 1
Union, University and Schools Club, Sydney

 Guest speaker: John O’Sullivan, the new editor of Quadrant

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Australian columnists criticize PM Tony Abbott for giving a speech on national security in front of an array of Australian flags. A Labour front-bencher in the UK has to resign when she tweets a photograph of a white van parked outside a terrace house festooned with the St. George’s flag of England — van and flags being symbols among the elite for vulgar jingoism and the white working class respectively. Tory politicians and journalists in the UK start denouncing the vulgar jingoism of UKIP on the grounds that “we English don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

All these particular episodes — and they could multiplied many times over — suggest that patriotism and the flag are now contested issues in the national politics of the Anglosphere, the United States, and continental Europe. National and transnational…