It was a special episode of Question Time, a British political discussion programme that would be more accurately titled ‘Sit Still and Be Told’ for the calm reasonableness with which its studio audiences would sit and watch politicos and pundits debate the issue of the day. This one was being co-presented by Richard Dimbleby and Kerry O’Brien in the leadup to the Constitutional Convention, and it was clear from the start that this was not going to go according to plan. The official speakers got their two cents in, but after that it was a free-for-all, with questions and comments flying across the audience in the bleachers. Someone asked something and got howled down by half a dozen arguments from the rear. Geoffrey Robertson misheard a question and trotted out an inappropriate punchline he’d been storing all evening, and never heard the end of it. The British participant, Simon Heffer – he looks like his name – had the ashen demeanour of someone whose royal tennis match has turned into a biker orgy. But it was Hawke who brought the house down, responding to Hayden’s call for a directly elected head of state: ‘Warrl, Bill, I got you past Cabinet for GG, and I reckon I could have got you two-thirds of both Houses, but, mate, not even I could have convinced the public to vote for ya as president.’ Collapse of the audience into renewed shouting. When it was all over, the junior investment banker – Manchester’s only black conservative – turned to me and said only, ‘Good God’.

What was intriguing was that everyone in the room – Finns, Poms, Germans, Irish and more – noticed the distinctive spirit abroad in that debate, the democratic temper of a barely controllable tin-shed meeting. And they liked it. And Donald Horne has been asking that question longer and more insistently than most commentators. His latest book is both a continuation of that search and a more critical reflection upon it. Looking for Leadership is in part a look back at the Howard years – with a title like that what else could it be – but it also examines the transition of Australia from the sort of place that Howard felt relaxed and comfortable into the place he ended up governing.

Horne tries long and hard to find positive things to say about John Howard, but it’s a frustrating and desperate struggle. The wave of economic growth under the Howard years began barely months after the Keating government left office, and could be due to the latter’s long-term restructuring, or the rejuvenation of the US economy, or a dozen other things. Gun control? Howard showed courage there but forfeited much of the gloss when he wore a bulletproof vest. East Timor? The long-awaited honouring of our commitment to that nation was fudged when Howard highlighted it as part of our role as US watchdog in the region. And that’s about it. On the debit side are multiple entries attesting to Howard’s failure to understand the complexities of the place he had been elected to lead or to respond to it in a creative fashion.

Horne deplores, above all, the abandonment of a bipartisan approach to issues that have hitherto been seen as the advance of progress and tolerance. Ever since Menzies left the scene, he notes, leaders on both sides had made a commitment to multiculturalism, reconciliation and a reorientation to Asia. Howard’s masterstroke has been to re-politicise these areas. From the time he jumped on the Blainey bandwagon and called for a reduction in the quota of Asian immigration, to his government’s first act – an audit of ATSIC (which has problems with corruption and wastage, as opposed to efficient and transparent organisations like, say, the Department of Defence) – to his refusal categorically to repudiate Pauline Hanson’s rancorous, resentful take on contemporary Australian society, Horne finds Howard guilty of being unable to grow into the leadership. Howard cannot transcend his particular prejudices and understand that, like it or not, he is leading a very different country from the one he grew up and formed his personal values in. Horne bookends this with a reflection on the places he grew up in – 1930s Kogarah (which also spawned Clive James and Graham Richardson – clearly there was something in the water) and Muswellbrook – and a trip back to the places today – a much transformed regional shopping centre with a plethora of ethnicities and subcultures inhabiting what was once a fairly homogeneous area.

This takes him into a reflection on his own project and ruminations on the fact that a mediatised, globalised world has made the question of national and historical identity a more complex issue than it formerly appeared. We may live on the same street, but we can inhabit very different cultural and imaginative worlds. In this context, the ALP is criticised for failing to become a party of postmodern national understanding or to give back to people a way of thinking about our possibilities, rather than rolling itself into a ball and waiting for its turn on the government benches.

There’s so much to agree with in Horne’s analysis of contemporary life that, at times, it seems as if he is speaking for some general will, some sort of future vision by public acclamation. At that point, alarm bells ring. Why?

I think it’s because his vision is one that naturally occurs to the intellectually trained, to those whose characteristic way of life is to take things apart and put them back together again in new ways. That seems ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ to people from the broad swathe of the ‘new’ or information/knowledge economy; it seems less so to those from older formations – the rural sector and parts of the industrial working class, to name two – who continue to look for a particular heritage and a concrete story of their identity. Horne calls for an emphasis on civic rather than national identity. It was this promise of civic possibilities that I and those freezing Europeans saw on television in Hackney. It’s the hope that, spared the imperial bullshit of American exceptionalism, we could tap into the sense of the place as a genuinely democratic culture, where everything is up for grabs.

But those Europeans wouldn’t, for a second, surrender their particular stories of national identity for the promise of a civic future, finding it, as many of us do, somewhat devoid of content, anodyne. That may be a deep-seated cultural given, which a pluralist multi-culture will have to deal with – a condition involving tougher choices than a call to ‘post-national identity’.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a good and timely book, all the more impressive for its ability to reflect on the author’s earlier positions. But a deeper reflection on the relation between ‘intellectuals’, the general public and the formation of ideas is required in thinking about the best and worst we can become.