“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” So, according to his tireless amanuensis James Boswell, said Dr Samuel Johnson on the night of 7 April 1775. We don’t know which particular scoundrel provoked the comment, only that it came in the course of a general discussion of the virtues of patriotism. That Johnson considered patriotism to be estimable we can have little doubt − in the fourth edition of his celebrated Dictionary, published two years previously, he defines a patriot as: “One whose ruling passion is the love of his country.” Although, he also adds: “It is sometimes used for a factitious disturber of the government.”

Now, almost a quarter of a millennium later, we’ve been visited by a disturber of the government, coincidentally called Johnson, who came before us clad in little else but the union flag and bicycle clips. Did we believe Boris Johnson to be a scoundrel, or someone whose ruling passion was the love of his country? Well, perhaps a better way to answer the question is not to interrogate the phenomenon of Johnson himself – having been up-close on several occasions he has always struck me (to paraphrase Churchill) as an enigma wrapped inside a whoopee cushion − but to closely question ourselves.

Boris Johnson has always struck me as an enigma wrapped inside a whoopee cushion

Yes, those of us who woke up on Friday 24 June to discover that far from being patriots, under the new dispensation we were very likely to be regarded as not simply scoundrels but quite possibly traitors. I grew up listening to Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex belting out, “Identity is the crisis of today!” − and needless to say, identifying strongly. The child of an American Jew and a left-leaning Englishman, I don’t think I ever heard the P-word used in our household. My father had been a conscientious objector during the second world war, and while he could be wistful about certain aspects of Englishness – such as cricket, bitter beer and rolling countryside – my suspicion is he felt altogether disaffected from the trappings of orthodox patriotism. He became an immigrant in Australia in 1982 and, having taken citizenship, died there in 1999. I have never knowingly stood for a loyal toast, or sung the utterly tedious national anthem in many years. I hold a US as well as a British passport, and regard myself as a Londoner by virtue of having been born – and still living – there. The question of patriotism simply doesn’t arise: my loyalty could, potentially, be to any body of people with whom I was engaged in the business of sustaining a community – whether it be a pride of British lions or a flock of French moutons.

If the emotional fallout from the referendum result causes us to do anything, it should be to question our own identities, and how – if at all – these relate to concepts of national sovereignty. Far from being unusual, I suspect my ambiguous attitude to love of country is now very widespread indeed – while just as widespread are the union jacks and St George’s cross flags flying in front gardens. It was these that JG Ballard noticed sprouting among the leylandii along his own tarmac backwater in the early 2000s, and which led him to write Kingdom Come, his final novel – a characteristically minatory vision of an Ingerland driven into the arms of bigotry and violent civil unrest by sheer boredom. If we cast our minds back, we can see that this “ruling passion” has been distinctly unruly over the last decade – free-floating about the political spectrum, taking temporary accommodation in the BNP, then flitting over to Ukip, before finally coming home to roost in the Brexit campaign.

Patriotism in action … St George’s cross flags fly in Redcar earlier this week. Photograph: Scott Heppell/AFP/Getty Images

If I try to get a grip on the “patriotism” that has allegedly propelled us out of the European Union, I find that it crumbles between my fingers. Certainly, the traditional institutions and symbols of nationhood seem uppermost in the minds of those who are intent on “taking back our sovereignty”, and thereby, they claim, reinvigorating the democratic process. The paternalistic monarchy, the dutiful army and the ghostly church are all invoked – as is a sense of terroir, or heimat – of being rooted in place, as opposed to smeared across the continent by low-cost airlines. We hear talk of distinctively “British values”, such as tolerance, fair play, and some sort of mysto-juridical insight bestowed on our judges, which apparently makes them able to peer into people’s souls. Yet it’s unclear to me – as I imagine it may be to you – how these qualities can be said to inhere in any given individual solely by an accident of birth; “Britishness” and “patriotism” are incommensurable without a peculiar sort of sleight of mind, one practised by all dominant societies − or at least those who aspire to punch above their weight on the international stage.

Rather, patriotism in contemporary Britain seems to me to be just another variant of identity politics: the elevation of a contingency to the status of a virtue. How the new patriots can square their ruling passion with Britain’s transparent inability to rule the waves is beyond me. One issue that received remarkably little airtime during the referendum campaign was the diminution in our sovereignty implicit in our dependence on the world’s real military hegemon. For the novel I’m currently working on I interviewed a number of serving and retired British army officers, and they all told me the same thing: British forces are no longer able to conduct large-scale operations without the US, and their real challenge is ensuring “interoperability” with superior American weaponry and communications systems.

I suspect our own contemporary and rather less scholarly Johnson understands a little better than the sentimentalists he’s whipped up that no dictionary properly defines their “patriotism”. The country they love no longer exists, except in Ealing comedies – my favourite one of which is Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which plucky Londoners paradoxically demonstrate their Britishness by seceding from the British state. The Brexiters, by summoning up the patriotic genie, are implicitly calling on Britons to either become more parochial and less diverse – or else aspire to a second imperial age. I wish them luck; for myself I’m staying in Lambeth (remain share of the referendum vote: 78%), and calling on my neighbours to seriously consider following the – albeit fictitious – example of those at the other end of Lambeth Bridge.