I was on a panel last week, talking about good nationalism and bad nationalism. The difference, to me, is pretty plain, though not without controversy. Good nationalism is a certain specific solidarity based on the things you have created together, as a nation, and the things you aspire to create: you could call it, for short, Danny Boyle nationalism, and it takes in the NHS, the industrial revolution, the internet, as well as other less cinematic things, such as the sewage system.

It will never be an entirely heartwarming tale – a lot of infant bones went under the machinery of that revolution, for instance – but national pride without the maturity to recognise its violent elements is saccharine. Good nationalism is inclusive not because it constantly thumps on about how inclusive it is, but because it includes, by definition, every man, woman and child who contributed to the achievement.

Good nationalism does not resort to abstract self-asserted values – fairness, tolerance – that any nation could say about itself. It has concrete achievements that it can point to, whether of infrastructure or of living standards, and definable aspirations that it can work towards: green energy or universal lifelong education, say. It is not a creed of exceptionalism – in order to be proud of your sewage system, you don’t need France not to have one, and you don’t need to have had one first. It does not fear change, since generative political action always makes change. Indeed, that’s the point. Good nationalism is not absolute: you do not need to be proud of Oliver Cromwell in order to be proud of Jessica Ennis-Hill.

The classic fissure on the left is whether or not there is any legitimate pride to be taken from the geographical happenstance of where you were born or made your home. I have no problem with a bordered civic identity: our borders describe the limits of our democratic agency. Patriotism is democracy, distilled: satisfaction and solidarity rooted in having created the conditions in which generosity and innovation could thrive. I could admire another country – it’s most likely Denmark, let’s face it – but I wouldn’t take pride in it, except at the generic level of the species.

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That was how I was expecting the panel debate to unfold: can nationalism ever be creative, or is it necessarily destructive? I need to get out more.

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck, has a forthcoming book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. He argues that what I would call “bad nationalism” – the global surge in rightwing populism – is driven by large-scale immigration, and the threat it poses to the cultural identity of the ethnic majority. Some people fear change; they prefer the monocultural landscape in which they grew up, and visible changes to it threaten their sense of belonging and security. Certain attitudes are, if not hereditary, baked in to the point where they may as well be.

He supports this view with plentiful survey data, a favourite nugget being that the way you answer the question, “Would you prefer your children to be well-mannered, or to be considerate?” is a major predictor of whether you’d vote for or against Trump and Brexit.

The question is a proxy for what the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the strict father (well-mannered) versus the nurturant family (considerate) model. These frames are the timeless and elemental organising principles for our political divisions – authoritarian versus pluralist, right versus left – all the way back to Christ the Warrior versus Christ the Saviour.

I believe people respond to authoritarian and pluralist arguments according to who’s making them, how trenchantly they are made, and the economic, media and political environment around them. Austerity soil has always been notoriously fertile for authoritarian ideas. Yet Kaufmann dismisses any economic factor, saying that had there been one, 2008 would have seen an upturn in rightwing nationalism, not 2017. My view is that depressions take years, not months, to grind people down.

The fundamental question, though, isn’t about the economics of nationalism, nor about whether a sense of cultural identity with an ethnic element can ever be accommodated, or will always be zero-sum. It is this: “bad nationalism”, the suspicious and anti-immigrant kind, the “hostile environment” kind, the static kind, the kind that, out of nowhere, thinks sovereignty is the burning issue of the day and that building a wall will solve anything, thrives not because the majority secretly thought this all along, but because there is no countervailing narrative of “good nationalism”.

The nation is defined not by its puffed-up declaration of values, nor by its tacit cultural exclusions, but by what it built together and what it seeks to build.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist