{"id":550,"date":"2002-05-06T02:51:46","date_gmt":"2002-05-06T09:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/05\/britains-lack-of-patriotic-spirit\/"},"modified":"2002-05-06T02:51:46","modified_gmt":"2002-05-06T09:51:46","slug":"britains-lack-of-patriotic-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/05\/06\/britains-lack-of-patriotic-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain’s lack of patriotic spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t— In one of his more bizarre applications of one-size-fits-all, jingoistic theory, Mr. Anglophile<\/a> jumps through obscure hoops explaining why there’s not a Le Pen in Great Britain at the moment:<\/p>\n

Why is Britain such an exception? Two reasons stand out. One is the lack of a nationalist tradition of the Continental type, in which adulation of the nation-state becomes a pseudo-religion justifying the submersion of the individual in a greater cause. Absent this, patriotism becomes merely a statement of sentiment, a love of community, place and history drawing on elemental emotions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if Brits and Americans are any less patriotic than Continentals. Let me refer you to Mr. Nick Denton<\/a>, that extraordinary Internet troll, who offers a much more sensible explanation for the fact that Brits and Americans don’t vote for Anglosphere<\/i> Supremacists:<\/p>\n

Much as I’d like to believe in the unique qualities of the Anglo-American tradition, there’s one obvious reason for the absence of far-right parties in the UK: the electoral system. A first-past-the-post system, which applies in the US and the UK, punishes smaller political groupings. So far-right voters are forced to subsume themselves within the main conservative party. If the UK and the US had proportional representation or two-round presidential systems, they would have their Le Pens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Think about it: if Bush were running in a national election against Pat Buchanan with no other choices allowed, wouldn’t Pat most likely poll 15-20% of the vote? He’d get all the far right, and some of the disaffected left who simply don’t want to vote for the mainstream candidate, so of course he would. While it’s an amusing parlor game to connect medieval institutions with object-oriented programming, there’s nothing to it but snake-oil, and it only appeals to people fundamentally ignorant of world culture<\/a> and politics and correct hyperlink structure.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

— In one of his more bizarre applications of one-size-fits-all, jingoistic theory, Mr. Anglophile jumps through obscure hoops explaining why there’s not a Le Pen in Great Britain at the moment: Why is Britain such an exception? Two reasons stand out. One is the lack of a nationalist tradition of the Continental type, in which … Continue reading “Britain’s lack of patriotic spirit”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-8S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}