Post by Jack Jacobs

From my new essay, “The New Cultural Cringe: When Pauline Hanson met Tommy Robinson” SOMETHING STRANGE is happening to Australia in the United Kingdom. Our highest-profile right-wingers are visiting London as a site of pilgrimage and warning. Beware, they prophesise: this is what Australia will become should it continue down the path of radical Islam and multiculturalism. I’m an Australian who has been living in England for three years, but in the past weeks I’ve been forced to confront home here. In a 1950 essay, the Australian critic A. A. Phillips warned of a “cultural cringe” in which Australians, insecure about their own intellectual and cultural lives, looked to Britain as the be-all and end-all of civilisation. Today, some Australians on the right practice a new form of the cultural cringe: importing British visions of doom, and British far-right solutions, into Australia. By importing their reading into our analysis of Australia, we prevent ourselves from seeing our own problems—and our rare ability to solve them—clearly.