Patriotism: Does It Still ‘Go Without Saying’?

by Sean Bw Parker (March 2025)

Being a middle class British person born in the 1970s, my idea of patriotism ‘goes without saying.’ This comes from the innate societal belief that flag-waving and blatant similar displays are crass, and what ‘they’ do, not ‘us.’ But does it still go without saying?

Britain, primarily Scotland, is the historical home of free speech via Enlightenment thinking, which includes a good deal of self-reflection and internal critique. However a multi-flanked attack by the forces of multiculturalism and campaigning journalists/academics has put increasing strain on this tradition.

The UK in the mid 2020s is not so much like Germany in 1933 as the Ottoman Empire in 1918, when it was dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’ —shortly before being carved up by World War One, followed by Ataturk secularising the modern Republic of Turkey. The immigration waves started in earnest by Tony Blair’s New Labour government at the end of the 90s were sold to the left as a hippy dream of equal rights, and to the right as good for GDP with an aging population.

The reality is that integration is only possible after many generations, if then, and the result is the UK becoming an economical platform to many, rather than a nation with a long history. Critics of this long history point to the US as a model of multiculturalism, forgetting that, native Americans notwithstanding, that country was an anti-British ‘project’ of gathering freedom-loving people from around the known world.

The British are a people, pre-1950s, comprised of various peoples from all over Europe either by long-term conquest or geographical proximity. Over a long period of time these people would ‘become’ British: but didn’t become British-Swedish etc, as the process wasn’t based on political social engineering.

An aging population is in humanistic terms a good thing – something we’ve been striving for forever, and it is incumbent on technology to fit the economy around this new shape rather than destroying the indigenous culture by constant attacks and intellectual strategies.

After two decades-plus of constant identity politics and so-called progressivism, the Trump election and Brexit referendum of the mid 2010s seemed to have taken the international left by surprise, following which they ramped up ‘woke’ messaging, and stoking the attendant culture wars. This led to ‘fake news’, constant hoaxes, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter riots, and deep social schisms over the Covid lockdowns, all rolled along by the binary-encouraging economics of social media.

At the same time as the trans industry was upended by laws banning biological males from sports and puberty blocker bans, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies were unravelling on both sides of the Atlantic. UK and US rationalists joined forces against what some refer to as the globalists, who appear to resemble the old international socialist movement with better technology and a lot more money.

Staunchness, or being ‘based’, suddenly had a new currency, and traditional conservatives found themselves jockeying with new ‘tech bro’ type rationalists on what was just a few years before dubbed the alt.right.

My first and only visit to America was in 1990, when my father and I visited my older half bother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Everything seemed huge and modern, as such a country will do to a 15 year-old travelling from South Wales and experiencing the New Orleans Superdome and Mardi-Gras within a day of each other.

The renowned openness and positivity were on full display however, and the fact of most normal Americans being deeply patriotic, with Stars and Stripes displayed in front gardens and windows in many places, was striking. The contrast of this with the ‘cultural cringe’ still very present in my quite left-wing father and my half-brother’s entrepreneurial graphic design business was also eye-opening.

It became clear what ambition and forward, can-do thinking meant, and how going at life full throttle might have its benefits. It also became more clear, just as I discovered Nietzsche, how being ashamed of one’s own historical background can cripple brightness, and that full, unapologetic of all historical power dynamics of the past is the only revisionism that made sense.

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