One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Partly, it’s as Davis says, a different time sense where one lives in “the eternal present of the market”, seeing the future as something amenable to both unpredictability and calculation. Partly it’s a belief that meaning is an individual affair, and that progress is the result of the aggregation of individual decisions through the mechanism of the market. Liberals are often highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom.

In actually existing Australian politics, of course, we’ve been beset by culture wars for a decade or more, where those taking up the sword in the “battle of ideas” have – despite some protestations to the contrary – been far more conservative than liberal. But, and here’s the rub for conservatism, with the decay of institutional authority and moral certainties of all kinds, all this results more and more in an articulation of a narrow sense of national belonging with the individual. Secular ceremonies such as Anzac Day aside, we’re supposed to be patriots only in the privacy of our own castle, as it were. Not too dissimilar to George W. Bush’s “beat the terrorists through spending money” thing.

So all the sound and fury of the “battle of ideas” aside, what’s left of the sense that “being Australian is an ethical project”? Our cultural history, Davis argues, is replete with a particular privilege given to fairness and egalitarianism (at least among those within the symbolic pale of Australianness), and what really is a social as much as a political democracy – a set of habits and attitudes as much as the institutional and policy architecture which sustained and gave voice to them. Is much left of this tradition? Should we be looking to ourselves rather than to the state or the Labor party or whoever to sustain them? These are questions if not raised then implied by his book which I think are well worth posing.