The slogan of "love it or leave" so famously plastered on an Aussie flag singlet at Woolworths this week is not patriotic, but something sadder, paranoid and uncertain, writes Jonathan Green.

If you don't love it, leave ... yes, but love what exactly?

That's the trouble with the sort of angry insistence in slogans like that, in the script so famously plastered on the blue Aussie flag singlet momentarily offered for sale in two Woolworths stores this week.

The real issue being not so much the threat of eviction, but the sense of certainty behind the definition of "it" ... this country, us.

What and where is this Australia we must either love or leave? Presumably it's not the almost unconsciously tolerant, effusively multicultural, free, liberal and accepting reality ... where is the tension in that Australia? Where is the possible cause of offence so grave that expulsion is the only remedy?

Love it or leave it.

According to Miranda Devine, writing in the Daily Telegraph:

The self-appointed tolerance tsars of Australia are having such a hard time proving Australia is a land of bigots they are now jumping at shadows. They see racism where most people see patriotism ... Take the "racist singlet" furore whipped up by Greens MP Adam Bandt. "If you don't love it, leave" says the caption under an Australian flag ­ emblazoned on a blue singlet sold at Woolworths. Nothing racist about that. It's a call to patriotism.

Under the headline, "Letting minorities gag the majority" Andrew Bolt asks:

Exactly which "race" would be offended? Or is the real crime to be patriotic?

The real crime, quite possibly, is both the appropriation of the very idea of Australia and the empowering of the splinter of the population holding that view with the right to decide who should stay and who should go.

The truth of love it or leave it lies there: this is not a consensus conclusion but the angry protest of a minority who feel their view of what constitutes "Australia" is under challenge. Love it or leave it is a gesture of indignity and affront.

It rankles not so much because it's racist, or bigoted, but because it is so weirdly distant from the truth: a hostile defence of an idea of this country that either never truly existed or has long since been transformed by the march of people, ideas and simple time.

And the truth of this Australia is its best defence, its happy momentum is unstoppable. The anger of love it or leave is clear proof that the Australian project is a progressive and transforming enterprise.

Midweek John Howard and Janet Albrechtsen performed for the Menzies Research Centre, an event live tweeted by Miranda Devine. The former PM was asked for his views on multiculturalism.

Howard: I'm not a fan of multiculturalism. I'm a fan of multiracialism ... but once people are here they should become Australian.

Love it or leave.

And how deeply strange ... once people are here what else might they be but "Australian"? This is the essence of the conservative discomfort, that our reality unfolds and is constantly transformed. The idea of a country is drawn from the sum of the people in it, the accumulation of all their aspiration, it's an idea moulded by their present, not a fixed point of nostalgia and constraint.

A country is inherently progressive, a notion that evolves with the people and ideas it contains. The inertia in that process is the sort of conservatism so angry at that transformation it is driven to the threat of love it or leave; a conservatism that fixes on an imagined figment, a precious impression of the past.

It's conservatism found on both sides of politics, in an ALP driven by the power elite parlour games of trade unions that represent a dwindling fraction of the population, or in a Howard view that imagines the country as a service station forecourt filled with happy families in Holden sedans.

The anger behind love it or leave is at the prospect of change and the loss of a reality that is essentially imagined, or narrowly self-reflective and nostalgic.

It's not patriotism, but something sadder, paranoid and uncertain.

It's anger at the inevitability that it won't be them who either love it or leave, but you.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.