paulkincaid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
paulkincaid) wrote2025-03-15 11:00 am
paulkincaid) wrote2025-03-15 11:00 am
National story
Reading Stefan Collini's review of a 2005 biography of the very conservative historian Sir Arthur Bryant, and Collini notes Bryant's repeated claims that "an 'intellectual elite' was attempting to undermine 'ordinary people's' inherited religious and moral beliefs in order to impose a 'progressive agenda' that was alien to English traditions." Bryant would go on to argue that "(conservative) beliefs were natural and timeless, whereas his opponents' (radical) beliefs were the programmatic outcomes of 'system' and 'theory'." Consequently, Bryant's history "told 'the national story', which in turn revealed adherence to these traditional values to be the core of patriotism."
You can see exactly that process in the Brexit arguments of a few years ago ("we don't need no stinking experts"), and again in the Reform programme today. But it is not confined to England (Bryant tended to write about England rather than Britain), you see the same thing recurring across the world. The story has a familiar structure: emphasis on the great and noble past, particularly military heroics; the mythologising of defeats that somehow became a cause for celebration (Dunkirk, Valley Forge); the concentration on "Great Men" who of course just happened to look the same as us. You see this today in Netanyahu's Israel, in Orban's Hungary, and particularly vividly in Trump's America (though I suspect they might struggle with words like "programmatic"). Surely we on the left need to find a new way of telling the national story, but one that is still as vivid and attractive as the conservative version.
You can see exactly that process in the Brexit arguments of a few years ago ("we don't need no stinking experts"), and again in the Reform programme today. But it is not confined to England (Bryant tended to write about England rather than Britain), you see the same thing recurring across the world. The story has a familiar structure: emphasis on the great and noble past, particularly military heroics; the mythologising of defeats that somehow became a cause for celebration (Dunkirk, Valley Forge); the concentration on "Great Men" who of course just happened to look the same as us. You see this today in Netanyahu's Israel, in Orban's Hungary, and particularly vividly in Trump's America (though I suspect they might struggle with words like "programmatic"). Surely we on the left need to find a new way of telling the national story, but one that is still as vivid and attractive as the conservative version.