Taking Back the Flag

‍In the conservative Jersey shore town where my family and I spent the 4th of July, a large percentage of residents marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by draping their homes in red, white, and blue—banners and pinwheels and of course the actual flag. It reminded me of New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when in a comforting show of unity, people all over the city wore flag pins and other emblems honoring America. And although I’m usually too lazy to decorate extensively for any particular holiday, a semiquincentennial is obviously special, so my impulse was to join my neighbors and put up some modest red, white, and blue adornments of my own.

If only the decision was as simple as choosing which of the front planters to use to display our small collection of miniature flags.

One of the biggest myths perpetuated by President Trump and the MAGA movement is that Democrats and liberals and even Republicans who don’t agree with them don’t love America. And thanks to their harsh rhetoric, now anyone who brandishes the flag potentially conveys a political affiliation, not just support for our country.

So, what’s a patriotic “libtard” in a red county to do? (Their offensive word, not mine.)

It might not have been obvious from the recent Trump-instigated kerfluffle over the 250th celebration, but official planning for the event began in 2016, when Congress established the bipartisan Semiquincentennial Commission. In some ways, it feels like my own preparations technically started over forty years ago, when I chose American Civilization as my college major, which was described in the course catalog at the time as “an interdisciplinary approach to the study of American Culture as that culture manifests itself in significant historical events, in institutions, in the arts, and in general philosophical ideas and values.” To me, that meant considering the “big” questions about our country through the lens of a variety of academic disciplines: history and political science and literature and art and religion and sociology. What does it mean to be an American given the obvious inconsistencies between the theories of the Revolutionary War generation and their actual conduct (e.g., slave-owning Thomas Jefferson: “all men are created equal”), as well as our sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful history? Even after 250 years of contentious debate, we have no single answer.

In anticipation of the holiday, I (finally) began listening to Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic musical and at 832 pages, a serious time commitment. Although I still have a long way to go, I keep thinking about the book’s prologue, which Chernow titles “The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow” and which focuses on Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. After enduring the chaos of the war and Hamilton’s murder by a political rival, she lived for fifty years after her husband’s death—to the age of 97 and the eve of the Civil War.

A civil war. Not even a century after they all worked so hard to form what they thought would be a more perfect union.

We talk a lot about the current division in U.S. politics and society. But as Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson frequently reminds readers in her nightly newsletter, a misty-eyed reverence for the past can blind us to the existential battles we’ve already survived. We forget or ignore the profound disagreements and animosities amongst the men lumped together under the unifying label “Founding Fathers,” Jefferson and Madison hating Hamilton and all of them apparently hating poor John Adams. Maybe division is America’s default setting, baked into its very foundation.

In the months leading up to the 4th, I also enrolled in a lecture series offered by the New York Historical Society called “Breakfast University,” which features presentations by distinguished professors from around the country and which is intended to “provide historical context and a nuanced understanding to today’s rapidly changing world and onslaught of headlines.” In a lecture in June, Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University, took on the topic of “What Would the Founding Fathers Think of America Today.” Her talk encompassed a lot of historically controversial political topics, among them presidential power, judicial power and the rule of law, and social and religious diversity. But her core conclusion was a heartening reminder of the challenges presented by the great experiment of America: the Founders would be thrilled that the republic still exists—a result certainly not guaranteed 250 years ago—and they’d believe it would continue to exist.

Let’s hope she’s right. It would be naïve not to recognize that in the last decade (or whatever temporal measure you want to choose), fundamental changes have undermined if not destroyed essential aspects of our governmental systems and core traditions. It’s hard to see how the corrupt, divisive, malevolent Trump era ends, or what America will look like when it does. But I still put out my little flags on Saturday. You can’t let one side of a political debate usurp the country’s core symbol. And if the combative, aspirational Founding Fathers taught us anything, it’s that an ambitious vision of a better future is worth the fight even if it sometimes seems a long, long way away.