Strains on social cohesion cannot be dismissed as the embrace of multiculturalism has made the task of defining what holds the community together more challenging.

Last month in Washington, one of the United States’ most distinguished historians offered a passionate defence of America’s core faith. Namely, that it is a creedal nation with a nationalism based around neither race nor culture, but an idea.

“To be an American,” said Gordon S Wood, “is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Wood is the preeminent historian of the American revolution.

He took issue with what he labelled the latest “blood and soil effort” from current nativist voices in the US. He says they are claiming that “citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more recent migrants.”

As Wood argued, “there is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” and there was no sense of ethnic distinctiveness even at the time of the American Revolution in 1776. Much of the course of American history since, he added, has been an attempt to define an idea of America as one people.

He predicts that “America’s lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be an advantage in the 21st century, dominated as it is by mass migrations from the south to the north.”

One cannot help but notice the fears on the right and the left in Australia, that it is only a matter of if, not when, the ideas of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage nativists attract meaningful electoral support here.

That assumes a deep wellspring of Australian nationalism is ready to be tapped. It assumes cultural fracture, rising inequality, the housing crisis and high rates of immigration post-COVID provide fertile soil for an ‘Australia first’ movement.

The antisemitism and Islamophobia of recent years, most recently manifest in Pauline Hanson’s absurd burqa stunt in the federal parliament, are contributing factors, along with the firebombing of Jewish centres.

These strains on social cohesion cannot be dismissed. The question is what response they demand. Andrew Hastie’s recent dog whistle that Australians are starting to “feel like strangers in their own country” exploits this.

The assumption of a nativist Australian nationalism ready to be deployed in the service of this kind of exclusionary impulse should be treated with great caution.

Those in the past who have played the nationalist card in Australian politics have tended to come unstuck. Their efforts, with the possible exception of Billy Hughes during the First World War, have not addressed an eager public.

Australians have baulked at embracing a bush balladeer-cum-Eureka stockade-cum bully beef digger myth. In part because such efforts have usually been accompanied by both a big mouth and political incompetence.

This suspicion of nationalism also emerges from Australian historical experience, but it is not well understood.

Australians did, for much of last century, possess an acutely powerful sense of being “one people” – but that sentiment took a British race form.

With the collapse of Australian Britishness in the late 1960s and the formal eradication of the White Australia policy, successive governments quickly adopted ‘multiculturalism’ as the definition of national community.

This happened in an extraordinarily short period, indeed, almost overnight. From 1966 to 1976, Australia went from proclaiming itself to be “essentially British” to, as Malcolm Fraser put it, welcoming the end of “Anglo-Saxon conformity”.

All prime ministers since, with differing emphasis, have eschewed an Australian nationalism based around clashing cymbals or pounding drums, though John Howard exploited digger militarism. But by and large, the country has enjoyed a remarkable period of social cohesion.

It is true that periodic critiques of multiculturalism and rates of immigration have surfaced, most notably in the 1980s and the 1990s. There were also the smouldering resentments on display at Cronulla Beach in 2005.

Nevertheless, on each occasion, the middle ground held. Even the unprecedented flag-waving of the early 2000s, a practice arising largely from the Sydney Olympics and young Australians flocking to Gallipoli, did not give rise to a viable, extreme political movement that threatened the centre ground.

True, the embrace of multiculturalism has made the task of defining what holds the community together more challenging.

It would be almost unthinkable, for example, to hear a leader proclaim today that “immigrants and refugees, selected from more than 140 different countries, have been attracted by our British heritage and institutions”. Yet this was the opening sentence used by the most larrikin of Australian prime ministers, Bob Hawke, in his foreword to the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia.

This is no argument for complacency, however.

We need to know more about what the great diversity of migrants in Australia think about this nativist call from the right and how secure they feel.

Do their electoral numbers now deny the cities to the ‘Sky after dark’ right, to Barnaby Joyce and to Pauline Hanson? Does this nativism still appeal, though, to some British and New Zealand immigrants? What is the electoral impact on Indian and Muslim immigrants of Albanese’s relationship with Trump, and the Labor government’s attachment to AUKUS? What do they feel about Australia’s current relations with China?

These are questions worthy of greater inquiry, as is giving Australia’s ethnic diversity greater representation across all levels of Australian life.

Not for its own sake, but because it provides another bulwark against the temptation to whip up a nationalist frenzy that only feeds an inward-looking and ultimately destructive social and cultural impulse.

Republished from AFR.com, 30 November, 2025