Do you ever cringe at the sight of an American flag? Do you look at it and see in your minds eye the flags painted on the noses of precision guided bombs and the flags burning in the streets of foreign countries and the flags on the shoulders of riot police spraying firehoses on peaceful demonstrators in the 1960s and the flags that are waved so strongly by those who would attempt to solve all world problems with the American military. The flag has become the rallying point of a particular thread of ostensiably conservative patriotism that is strongly associated with large scale corporate conglomorates and an aggressively military foreign policy that tends to want to use the American military as the primary diplomatic weapon in providing security for those corporations. What is worse is that this group has an almost dogmatic patriotism – a patriotism that defines American identity by loyalty to America not by loyalty to an ideal or goal but to the actual reality of what America is doing. Flags, mottos of “Support our Troops” and sweeping generalizations of “For us or against us.” define their form of patriotism. Unfortunately that is what patriotism is so often understood as being in the U.S. today.

Given the huge moral blunders that the U.S. has made in its foreign policy and the rather sad state of democracy in the U.S. today, this position is (rightly) seen as largely hypocritical, lacking in real content, and extremely dangerous to the well-being of the world. For many people in the U.S. today, the flag has become a symbol of shame, hypocricy and blind imperialism. It is something for which the proper purpose is to display upside down, burning or juxtaposed with some image of American shame.

This needs to be reversed.

I think that part of the motivation for getting away from American symbols and patriotism in a feeling that those symbols are tainted by the neo-conservative hypocrisy and American imperialism. Another factor is that those symbols are seen more and more to be symbols, not of American ideal, but of American power and might. Certainly many of the uses of the flag can point to that.

However the response should not be to shy away from the symbols them selves, but to change the meaning of the symbols and the role that they play in our society. The strong association of such American symbols, especially with military and nationalistic overtones does in fact promote the sort of pro-American cultural imperialism that liberal America finds so distasteful. So in a sense we need to not only take back the symbols but the very meaning of patriotism in the U.S.

Patriotism is not nationalism and when the two become confused then the national identity becomes very hypocritical and dangerously conceited. Nationalism is the ferver to support what the nation is. Given America’s power and nebulous moral position in the world today this is certainly somthing to be avoided. However, a proper liberal patriotism should be concerned with the ideals of the U.S., particularly the liberal ideals of social justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. This form of patriotism looks critically at the U.S. today and can even be ashamed of the U.S. and its actions. However it is patriotic in relation to the ideals of American Liberalism. Symbols are needed as points around which to rally. Especailly in the realm of thought, it is hard to rally around subtle and complex issues. I think that the loss of American symbolism in liberal thought has lead to the strange trend of isolationism in American liberalism, especially foreign policy.

So my message today is that Liberals need to take back the flag! Let it fly no longer for imperialism, armies, corporations, closed-minded bigotry or the like. Let it fly for social justice, the environment, the equality of peoples and cultures and paradigms, the inherent rights of all peoples. Let it fly not for what America is but for what American was intended to be! Let it be not a self-congratulary picture to where we are, but a goal on a mountaintop to where we must always struggle towards.