Whose Flag?

by David Balashinsky

A friend recently posted the following meme on Facebook:

 

I usually avoid taking the bait when I see memes like this but this one seemed so belligerent and so obnoxious that I could not let it go without asking, "Who is telling you to apologize for our flag?"  The implication that Americans are being asked to apologize for the United States flag is only one of several falsities artfully woven into this work of propaganda but, because this notion stood out as being even more goading than the others (which is saying something), this seemed like a logical place to start.  Although my friend never directly answered my question, her response did get me thinking about how this meme epitomizes the right wing's misuse of our nation's flag and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which it cleverly packages animosity toward the values actually represented by the United States flag within an outward show of devotion to it. 

First, some context:  It is no secret that, especially since the Vietnam War, the right wing has sought to appropriate the U.S. flag as a political symbol of its view of America.  The left, itself, bears some responsibility for this.  I am old enough to remember when the U.S. flag was desecrated, burned and otherwise disrespected in protest of the U.S. war against Vietnam and in protest of any number of other evils perpetrated by the government of the United States.  (Its support of repressive, military dictatorships around the world and, especially, in Latin America throughout much of the latter half of the 20th century comes to mind.) 

There is an undeniable logic to this form of protest.  Since the flag symbolically represents the nation and since policies that are carried out by the government are carried out on behalf of the nation (and in the name of the People of the United States), U.S. government policies, the administration that enacts them, the nation itself and the flag that represents it are all links in a chain.  It stands to reason that, if one wants to condemn a policy that has the U.S. flag figuratively stamped all over it, stamping all over the flag, in turn, seems a valid and appropriate way to do it.

The problem, however, is that this form of protest by the left has played disastrously into the hands of the right, not just allowing it to appropriate the nation's flag as a symbol of right-wing values but enabling it to exploit the flag in an ostentatious display of its own professed patriotism.  This has reinforced the fiction that right-wingers and conservatives are more patriotic than left-wingers and liberals and that right-wing values are intrinsically more patriotic than left-wing values.  That is why the U.S. flag is ubiquitous on the lapel pins, the podiums, the buildings, the lawns, the websites, the pick-up trucks and motorcycles, even the clothing of right-wingers.  And, of course, in right-wing memes on social media.  

But despite the success that the right wing has had in appropriating our nation's flag as a symbol of its values, these are not the values that the flag actually represents.  And, generally, when the right wing waves the flag, it does so not as a statement of patriotism but as a form of "virtue signaling" and for the purposes of propaganda, as in the meme above.  To this patriotic American, this is an even more offensive desecration of the flag than burning it.  An even greater desecration of the flag occurs when it is waved alongside the flag of the pro-slavery and seditionist Confederacy.  And a desecration even greater than this occurred when the flag was used, literally, as a weapon by Trump's insurrectionists in their attempted coup on his behalf on January 6th.  That is why I believe it has been a gigantic mistake on the part of the left to let conservatives and other right-wingers get away with their appropriation of our nation's flag.  It is long past time that the nation's flag be reclaimed - not as a symbol of the left (although I do believe that the ideals articulated in the nation's founding documents are fundamentally liberal, rooted, as they are, in the European Enlightenment) - but as a non-partisan symbol of the nation's shared ideals and of the nation broadly, including everyone within it.

Which brings me to why this meme is so offensive and how it succeeds at being so antagonistic.  By claiming the flag as his through the use of the first person  - "this is my flag" (my emphasis) - what the creator of this meme is really saying is that it is not yours nor mine.  This contradicts both the letter and the spirit of our nation's original and traditional if unofficial motto: e pluribus unum - "from many, one."  Making the nation's symbol exclusive of one's political enemies is a favorite tactic of the right wing, but it is not just a rhetorical device.  White nationalists, the Christian Identity movement and Christian nationalists all, to varying degrees, actually envision the United States (or at least much of its geographical territory) as a White, Christian homeland in which non-White, non-Christian residents are less authentically American (and less authentically human, even) and not truly part of the fabric of the nation's polity.  That's what the alt-right movement is all about and it was precisely to this quandom undercurrent (until Trump legitimized it and brought it fully out into the open) of White nationalism, racism, religious bigotry, antisemitism and xenophobia to which Trump very deliberately appealed in 2015 and throughout his occupancy of the office of President of the United States.  Referring to the flag as "my flag" rather than as "our flag" clearly signals that this meme has little or nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with White nationalism.  "My flag," as it is used in this meme, is a repudiation of the sentiments of unity and camaraderie with all other Americans - the shared love-of-country that is the lifeblood of the American spirit - and serves no other purpose than to marginalize those Americans who are not in the same demographic group that overwhelmingly comprises the Republican base.

Is it a stretch to tie Trump and Trumpism to this meme?  Not really.  The person who originally shared it on Facebook (at least the version that I saw when it was re-posted by my friend) is Ina Holiday, a Las Vegas "entertainer and singer," and former candidate for the Nevada State Assembly whose Facebook page includes a goodly amount of anti-vaccine, anti-mask and pro-Trump memes and posts.

More to the point, it is also not a stretch to interpret this meme as a reaction against the Black Lives Matter movement.  Thanks to the efforts of Colin Kaepernick (and those who have joined him), our nation has lately been forced to reckon not just with its history of racism but with the systemic manifestation of that racism which persists to this day.  (This is even more true since the murder of George Floyd.)  Not unlike the flag-desecration of those who protested against U.S. policy and warfare in Vietnam in the 1960s, Kaepernick's symbolic gesture of kneeling during the playing of the national anthem is intended to admonish the United States - albeit in a vastly less confrontational and more respectful way than flag-burning - for its racism by strategically directing that admonition toward the national anthem, a symbol of the United States that is probably second only to the flag itself in terms of significance and veneration.  The meme, of course, makes no mention of the BLM movement or of the increasingly widespread consciousness of racism that we are seeing today but, given the current political and social context, it is hard to imagine that anything else could be intended by the reference to "skin color, race [and] religion." 

Just as denying the existence of racism is a form of racism, attempting to invalidate any criticism of systemic racism on the grounds that such criticism is unpatriotic is also a form of racism.  To the extent that the BLM movement and Critical Race Theory (another favorite bogeyman of conservatives) constitute critiques of our nation's systemic and institutionalized racism, this meme seems intended to invalidate them by treating them as an attack on the nation's flag and, therefore, on the nation itself.  

It achieves this partly through the affectation of grievance but also through the use of innuendo.  Both the second and third statements in the meme ("I will not apologize for [the flag]" and "It does NOT [sic] stand for skin color. . . .") employ the same rhetorical technique: an assertion is phrased negatively and in opposition to what the creator of the meme intends us to believe is a previous assertion to which he is merely - but with justified indignation - responding.  Thus, by declaring that he will not apologize for the flag, the audience is led to believe that someone else has demanded that he should.  And by declaring that the flag does not stand for skin color, the audience is led to believe that someone else has claimed that it does.  

One of the purposes of this meme, then, is to inspire those who view it with this same feeling of righteous indignation against the long-overdue reckoning of our nation's history of systemic racism.  In other words, to get them riled up against the movement for racial justice.  Another is to raise the alarm that the meaning of the flag is being deliberately subverted.  The theme that both the flag and its meaning are under siege is visually represented (and rather artfully, too, to give credit where credit is due) by depicting the flag perseveringly and defiantly waving before a landscape that is clearly intended to be seen as a battleground.  The land in the foreground is barren, the trees stripped of much of their foliage while, in the distance, the sky glows red and orange as though from the fires of a recent or ongoing bombardment.  We are meant to understand from all this that it is not just the flag and its meaning that are under assault but the heart and soul of our very nation. 

The idea that our nation and our way of life are under attack is now the predominant theme of White-nationalist, Republican and Trumpist discourse.  Writing for The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein described the history and the current state of "the ominous tenor of contemporary Republican messaging":

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign . . . Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the "Flight 93 Election." . . .  Anton insisted that a Democratic victory would change America so irrevocably that conservatives needed to think of themselves as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11 - the ones who chose to bring down the plane to save the U.S. Capitol from al-Qaeda hijackers.  Letting the Democrats win, in other words, would doom the country. . . .

For at least the past decade, GOP candidates and conservative-media personalities have routinely deployed rhetoric similar to the Flight 93 argument.  Only about 40 hours before the [January 6] insurrection, at a campaign rally hosting an enthusiastic, virtually all-white audience in rural Georgia, President Trump insisted that if Democrats won the state's two Senate runoff elections . . . "America as you know it will be over, and it will never - I believe - be able to come back again."

And, of course, on January 6th, while inciting his mob before it assaulted the capitol in order to prevent the certification of Biden's electoral victory, Trump declaimed "We fight like hell.   And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

In his speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for him to run for president again in 2020, Trump declared "this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it."

As CNN reported last January, the day before leaving office, former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo tweeted, "Wokism, multiculturalism, all the -isms - they're not who America is.  They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. . . ."  In the same story, CNN notes that in remarks he delivered the previous July,

Pompeo fanned the flames of division stoked by Trump, warning that "the very core of what it means to be an American, indeed the American way of life itself, is under attack" amid nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.

Also last January, writing in Vox, Zack Beauchamp drew essentially the same conclusions as Brownstein (in the Atlantic) namely, that "The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics."

The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. . . .

Whether elite Republicans genuinely believe what they tell their base is beside the point.  The fact is their delegitimizing rhetoric has been the fuel of the conservative movement for many, many years now.

Beauchamp noted that, on the morning of January 6th, Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, "tweeted that the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to a new American revolution.  'Today is 1776,' she wrote."  Ten years earlier, Sharon Angle (a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate) had stated in an interview "that she believed that Americans might need to take up arms against the tyranny of Barack Obama and the Democratic congress."

Writing for the New Yorker last spring, Susan B. Glasser pointed out that

In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty percent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far "off track" that "American patriots may have to resort to violence" against their political opponents.

Last month, writing for the Washington Post, Ruth Ben-Ghiat reported that 

In June, an anchor of One America News suggested that execution might be an apt punishment for the "tens of thousands" of "traitors" who, he claimed, stole the election from former president Donald Trump.  A sitting member of congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Americans in May that they "have an obligation to use" the Second Amendment, which is not about recreation but "the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary."

. . . 

This Republican culture of violence and threat builds on histories of racial persecution and on policing used as an instrument of terror against non-Whites.  Habituation to such violence, reinforced by the presentation of non-Whites as an existential threat to the future of America (as in the "great replacement theory" that Tucker Carlson has referenced on Fox News) makes it easier for the public to accept violence around political events, like elections, as necessary to "save the country."  Tellingly, the participants in the January coup attempt, which was billed as just this kind of patriotic act, included 57 local and state GOP officials. . . .

The meme that I have been discussing here is a distillation of the Republican worldview of imagined or affected persecution, that America and "the American way of life" are under assault from within (by Democrats, otherwise known as "radical leftists," and the BLM movement), and that part of the epochal struggle for the heart and soul of America, indeed, its very survival, includes a propaganda war currently underway for the meaning of our nation's national symbol, the U.S. flag.  On this front, the meme's creator steadfastly holds the line against those fifth-columnists who demand that he apologize for the flag and who would see his flag debased as it only could be by the suggestion that its broader meaning might actually have something to do with skin color, race and religion.

So, what does the flag, with its red and white stripes and white stars on a blue background represent?  Of course "it does not stand for skin color, race or religion" but, equally, it does not "stand for" freedom (or "FREEDOM"), as the meme's creator claims.  At face value, the flag symbolizes merely what we all learned in elementary school that it does.  The stars in the upper left-hand corner represent the number of states currently in the Union while the thirteen red and white stripes represent the original thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.  There are deeper meanings associated with the design of the flag, too, including its colors and the symbolism of its particular design.  Most sources credit  Charles Thompson, the secretary of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789, who was instrumental in designing the Great Seal of the United States, with the use of red, white and blue (for the Seal) and attribute their symbolic intent, which comes from heraldry and which subsequently became associated with the colors of the flag, itself, to the following quote by Thompson:

White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valor, and Blue, the colour of the Chief, signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice.

Ultimately and most importantly, the flag is a national and non-partisan symbol of the nation and of the unity of its states and of its people.

To be clear, no one is being asked to apologize for the flag.  What their fellow Americans are being asked to do by the Black Lives Matter movement and others is to recognize the reality that the enslavement of Black people was the original sin of our nation's founding, written into our very constitution (its liberal ideals, notwithstanding).  Acknowledging our nation's past wrongs, the legacy of those wrongs and the wrongs that persist to this day is not an assault on the flag nor a demand that anyone apologize for the flag.  To suggest otherwise is to denigrate the cause of racial justice by defining it as conflicting with what the flag represents when, in fact, in a very real sense, this is what the flag represents: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . ."

My own view of the flag, looking beyond its obvious, superficial symbolism, is that it represents the ideals that our nation was founded on.  It represents not only the best that America has been in the past and is now but could be in the future.  It ought to inspire feelings of togetherness and camaraderie, mutual understanding, compassion, reconciliation, resoluteness, justice, courage and, above all unity.  That means having the rectitude, the strength, the wisdom and the will to acknowledge the ways in which our nation has erred and working together to create "a more perfect union," one that truly embodies justice and equality for all.

When I think of our nation's flag, then, and what it means to me, I experience overwhelmingly positive feelings, including pride.  In contrast, when I see the flag used as it is in this meme, I see only an angry, paranoid, scapegoating and militant belligerence.  This meme manages to turn what should be a positive and uplifting symbol into a hate-filled one.  It weaponizes the U.S. flag and, what is worse, weaponizes it against other Americans.  It perverts the transcendent symbolism of the flag - its very spirit - by converting it from unity and love-of-country to hatred of one's political enemies.  And that may be the biggest desecration of all.