The World Cup proved once again what the left resolutely fails to understand: the path to overcoming racism is patriotism.

One look into the stands and you’d have seen a sweaty mass of humanity embracing – all shapes, sizes, ages, and, importantly, colours. All hues, wearing one coloured jersey.

And why?

A shared love of country. Not shared ancestry. Not shared skin. Country.

This ought to be too obvious to need saying, and yet an entire intellectual class has spent 80 years pretending otherwise.

After the horrors of the Third Reich, the left drew the tidy and lazy conclusion that any fervour for one’s nation could only end in jackboots. It has never troubled itself to ask why Italian nonnas, Greek dads, and Lebanese teens went berserk when 20-year-old Nestory Irankunda, a Tanzanian refugee scored for Australia against Turkey.

Patriotism is not the enemy of tolerance. It is, so far, the only mechanism anyone has devised that reliably produces it. Call it, if you like, the great leveller. Best think of Australia as the club that will have you regardless of what you looked like when you joined.

Australians used to know this instinctively, and we had a Prime Minister prepared to say so. Bob Hawke, addressing the nation on Australia Day in 1988, declared that a ‘commitment to Australia’ was the sole and sufficient test of belonging, that there must be ‘no hierarchy of descent’ and no privilege of origin.

Note what he did not say. He did not say multiculturalism. He said commitment – to this country, its laws, its language, its idea of a fair go. That is a civic proposition, not a demographic one, and it is precisely the distinction the ruling class has spent the intervening decades smudging.

Europe, to its very limited credit, is starting to notice the smudge. Angela Merkel – no one’s idea of a knuckle-dragging reactionary – stood before her own party and confessed that the multicultural approach had failed, utterly failed.

The Danes have taken extraordinary steps to reverse the effects of multiculturalism by bulldozing so-called ‘parallel society’ housing estates and imposing compulsory language testing on four-year-olds. Their project is frank enough to publish its own targets for cultural absorption by 2030.

And yet in Australia, among the people paid to run the place – in business, in politics, in the university faculties that supply both – multiculturalism remains an article of unexamined faith.

Here is the point Pauline Hanson has been making since before it was fashionable to notice: a nation held together by a single civic culture is not a nation impoverished of its immigrants’ heritage. The Vietnamese can keep their New Year, the Greeks their Easter, the Lebanese their weddings that run four days – splendidly, and long may they.

What none of them get to keep, if they wish to call this home, is a separate loyalty when it counts.

Which brings us, unhappily, back to the tournament.

During Australia’s matches against Turkey and Egypt, clips circulated of sections of rival supporters here in this country chanting abuse at Australia itself – not at Popovic’s tactics, not at a missed penalty, but at the nation hosting their argument. That is not multiculturalism working. That is multiculturalism’s failure mode, on display, in real time, to a global audience.