Opinion: Democrats are reclaiming the flag — and it’s about time

Three weeks after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, stories emerged about Americans who decided to fly the Stars and Stripes again . Some had kept their flags folded and stored away during Donald Trump’s presidency, a silent protest against the MAGA pockets of racial hate, violence, intolerance and insurrection poisoning the nation.

The American flag is supposed to stand for something much different: “One nation under God, indivisible, with freedom and justice for all.” The country did not live up to that promise during the divisive Trump years.

Others shied away from flying the flag because the far right had claimed it — the Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, accelerationists and other fringe groups that want to impose their extreme values on America, if necessary, by inciting fear and violence.

In 2019, African American writer Damon Young told of a bicycle trip that he, his wife and two friends made through mostly white communities on the Great Allegheny Passage trail. They set out shortly after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. They found towns adorned with American flags, although the residents clearly did not welcome people of color.

“The sort of (white) people who clamber to distinguish themselves as the True Americans have weaponized the flag , manipulating it to antagonize those they believe to be less American,” Young wrote in TIME. “Trump didn’t create this dynamic, sure. Prominent American flags are hard to ignore when scanning footage of lynchings and Klan rallies from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. But the bedrock of Trump’s political career is the ceaseless exacerbation of this feeling.”

Politico told of a 72-year-old Vietnam veteran who took his flag down one year into the Trump administration. After Biden’s victory in 2020, he ordered a new one. “I said, ‘Time for my flag to go up,'” he told a reporter. The reporter wrote that similar stories were unfolding across the nation, “a spontaneous reclaiming of a symbol that, in the Trump years, had come to represent only one side.”

Weeks later, rioters carried American flags as they attacked the Capitol. Fulcrum’s co-publisher Kristina Bevar described them “using flagpoles as weapons and carrying flags while committing acts of violence.”

“These individuals…claimed the flag and called themselves patriots while acting in contradiction to true patriotism,” she wrote. “Their actions have deepened divisions and turned many patriotic Americans against the symbol of their country.”

Now, with Kamala Harris taking over the nomination of the Democratic Party, we are seeing fresh enthusiasm for the flag on the left, along with a new embrace of its promise of individual freedoms. It’s as though America is witnessing a national Capture the Flag contest dominated in recent years by fringe groups that have perverted the meaning of the Stars and Stripes. The rest of us have let it happen.

It’s time for all Americans to take it back and display it as the symbol it was meant to be: the flag of one nation, indivisible.

William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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