Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Dunn

Dunn’s line does a neat, almost surgical thing: it punctures swagger without granting it the dignity of outright menace. “Aggressive complacency” is a paradox built to sting. Complacency is supposed to be soft, sleepy self-satisfaction; make it aggressive and you’re suddenly looking at a politics that can’t stop proving itself. The boast isn’t a victory lap. It’s a demand to be believed.

The key move is psychological rather than constitutional. Dunn doesn’t litigate Scottish nationalism as a program; he reads it as a mood. Boasting becomes a symptom, not a platform. When he calls it “an expression of insecurity,” he shifts the argument from “Are the claims justified?” to “Why does this need to be performed so loudly?” That’s a poet’s tactic: redirect attention from slogans to the tremor underneath them.

Context matters here. Dunn is writing and speaking out of a post-imperial UK where Scottish identity has long been filtered through English institutions, London media, and an economy shaped by decisions made elsewhere. In that light, insecurity isn’t an insult so much as a historical inheritance: the sense of needing to narrate Scotland into solidity. His critique is aimed at the brittle version of nationalism that confuses volume for certainty, that treats self-definition as something you win by outshouting skeptics.

The subtext is cautionary: a movement can be morally serious and still slip into chest-thumping as compensation. Dunn’s sentence invites nationalism to mature past performance, toward a confidence that doesn’t need the audience’s applause to exist.