About time.

Samuel Johnson’s utterance is “famous” only because people who seem to have trouble with patriotism have done it to death. On their own, Johnson’s words are meaningless, as is referring them to them without explanation. What did Johnson mean?

Coady seems to favour the idea that it is the first refuge of a scoundrel as deemed by a person less know (if known at all by most people reading Coady’s article) than Johnson. Bierce, it seems, was a done-a-bit-of-everything American with no particular qualifications who did a bit of writing.

As with all people who preach the “evils” of patriotism, Coady is using the extremes of the sentiment to attack Australia. He is a typical academic white ant who seeks to undermine his own country instead of arousing awareness of the forces within -well, he couldn’t very well do that, could he, with his attitude? - and without that have ability to do real harm to Australia: much more harm than the odd over-the-top patriot can do.

Of course no country, including our own, is always right or wrong. But a few cases of extreme, if sometimes embarrassing, patriotic fervour are preferable to the wet left philosophy proposed by Coady and his mates in universities

Has anyone ever noticed how people on the right wing of the culture wars quite often use emotionally manipulative slur words and/or name calling instead of really addressing the topic or theme. And that they invariably use the language of binary exclusions. No shades of grey or complexity or multiple contexts and interpretations allowed.

Leigh, what would you regard as an 'extreme' form of patriotism vs. the regular garden benign variety?
How about singing the national anthem - a fairly innocuous practice, yes?
What about that inspirational little ditty La Marseillaise? The last lines translate approximately to "In death your enemies/See your triumph and our glory". Is that a fitting and responsible piece of civics education for little French boys and girls to be raised singing? It's a sentiment that sounds more at home at a training camp for suicide bombers to me. In fact, if a certain local Sheik got on air and said words to that effect, everyone would go into conniptions, but apparently it's just a harmless bit of patriotism if 6-year olds to sing it. Well, at least it tells the rest of the world the price of being an enemy of La France.
C'est la vie, non?

Its just as well Coady managed to pass this lot.
He would probably have died of constipation, if he hadn't.

There certainly is a lot of codswallop associated with public declaration of patriotism.
And it does seem to mean different things to different people. Before jumping onto any bandwagon, it would seem advisable to define what your concepts are for that particular burst of enthusiasm.
William Lines in his latest book, "Patriots", takes the interesting line that it might mean standing up in opposition to a Government and its laws when those laws are shown to be an ass and against the national interest.