Flags, Freedom, and Patriotism

How the Democrats are reaching out to the center.

Aug 22, 2024

This was not the campaign you expected. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that this is not the convention you expected. And I don’t mean, the music, or the vibes, or the rollcalls, or that incredible moment with Tim Walz’s son, Gus.

I mean the flags. The chants of “USA! USA! USA!” The constant invocation of “Freedom!” And the raw undiluted patriotism.

Close your eyes for a moment, and it feels like the sort of thing that you would have seen and heard at a Republican Convention in The Before Times. But this time around, the contrast with the GOP convention is searing, and for this center-right political orphan, deeply welcome.

Of course, it may not work. Donald Trump and his allies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince voters that Kamala Harris is a dangerous, alien radical, and a Communist who hates an America which is rapidly becoming a shithole country.

But, so far, the Democrats’ message to middle American is clear:

We share and respect your values and love this country as much as you do.
Even though we may disagree on a lot of issues, we have more in common than what divides us.
We are the defenders of the fundamental values that define this country.
America deserves better than the hate and division that Donald Trump is offering us once again.
And we are not the freaks.

Hat top: Noah Smith. Meme by @VoteDarkBrandon

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I won’t bore you again with an account of my political history, or of the soul-crushing, disillusionment of the last decade. But this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about one moment from 2016, in the midst of that first Never Trump fight. A few weeks after my confrontation with Trump on the radio, I was a “guardian” on an Honor Flight of WWII vets we had flown to Washington D.C..

I was assigned to a 90-year-old vet and at one point, we took a break in the shade (it was a hot day) and I got to look around at the flags and memorials around us — the statues of Korean War vets, the pillars of the WWII memorial, the Lincoln and Washington Memorials. A military helicopter flew over us, headed toward the White House.

And as I watched it go overhead, I remember feeling so strongly: We cannot let this happen. We can’t turn all of this over to a man like Donald Trump. We are so much better than this. I’d never felt more deeply in love with my country or more committed to fight for it in the only way that I could. And as I sat there, I knew with absolute certainty that I was never going to give in.

This is what it once meant to be a conservative, and how we would have described it back then: A belief in freedom, a set of shared values, common sense, character, and patriotism. We were unembarrassed by our symbols — the flags that reminded us of the sacrifices that had been made for the idea of America: it’s history, its people, its values, its promise.

It was painful to see all of that ripped apart and defiled by a shameless and unworthy demagogue. I remember thinking: That is not his flag, and he does not get to define what America is.

This is a long way around to what I’m seeing in Chicago (and why I’m loving it.)

There has been endless punditry about whether Kamala Harris and the Democrats would expand their tent by reaching out to centrists and disaffected Republicans. The record has been mixed: The convention has, indeed, featured outspoken Republican Never Trumpers. On policy, though, Harris has seemed more anxious to shore up her progressive base than shift toward the middle. (I’m still cringing over her suggestion of federal price controls, which she is scrambling to clarify.)

But the Democrats are doing something else to appeal to middle America. And it really is quite remarkable. Via the Wapo: “At convention, Democrats claim patriotism, American flag as their own.”

Patriotism is cool at this year’s Democratic National Convention.
Delegates wear suits adorned with stars and stripes, dresses with American flag patterns, and blouses featuring bald eagles or the Pledge of Allegiance. As attendees waved red, white and blue signs from their seats and chanted “U-S-A” on Monday night, country musician Mickey Guyton sang: “We got the same stars, the same stripes. Just wanna live that good life. Ain’t we all, ain’t we all American?”
The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is “nothing more American than freedom,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.
“There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,” Rahman said.

Writes Robert S. McElvaine:

It has been stunning this week how effectively the Democrats have taken back the principles and symbols of America – patriotism, the flag, family, the Declaration of Independence, the rule of law, democracy, and, most of all, FREEDOM – that had been stolen and corrupted by the right-wing extremists who have made the erstwhile Party of Lincoln their wholly-owned subsidiary.

It’s easy to dismiss all of this as merely performative. But, as the NYT notes, this sort of “muscular patriotism” is emerging as a central part of this year’s Democratic campaign.

At her first rally with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris delivered a riff about their quintessentially American backgrounds…
“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, populist, progressive patriot.

You can see it everywhere in this convention. In Wednesday’s newsletter, I linked to Noah Smith, who wrote: “The Democrats embraced patriotism after all.”

Anyone watching the Democratic convention in Chicago right now must be struck by the intense patriotism on display. American flags are everywhere. Convention-goers hold up signs saying “USA”. The delegate roll call celebrated every state in turn. A montage showed triumphant scenes from the history of America — the building of the railroads, the conquest of the Great Depression, World War 2 — with flags waving in every scene….

It is important to note that none of this was inevitable.

Back in 2021, when Smith wrote a post urging Democrats to snatch patriotism back from the GOP, he recalls, “Nothing I’ve ever written before or since has provoked such a strong and instantaneous backlash. Many progressives bristled at the notion that any of their rhetoric in the 2010s had been anti-patriotic.”

But, wrote Smith, it was, indeed, “a message that the entire progressive movement and Democratic party needed to hear.”

In the 2010s, the notion that America was a nation founded on racism was commonplace in progressive circles. Ibram Kendi’s 2017 book was titled Stamped from the Beginning. The marketing materials for the New York Times’ 1619 Project initially declared that the day the first slave arrived on North American shores was “our true founding” (before later scrubbing that language). One article claimed that the American Revolution was fought in order to protect the institution of slavery, despite academic historians pushing back strongly when hired to fact-check the piece. The belief that Adolf Hitler’s racial ideas came from America became a widely accepted fact among many progressive intellectuals.¹ Rhetoric equating the United States of America with white-nationalism became an applause line on Twitter:

In 2020, protesters toppled statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
This anti-patriotic attitude was a grassroots, bottom-up thing; it never made it into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and every other prominent Democratic leader continued to stand in front of American flags and sing the national anthem and so on. Yet the audience was not going wild like they are in 2024. In the late 2010s, Democrats’ pride in being American, which had been drifting down for years, took an abrupt tumble:

So how does Smith interpret the “the sudden efflorescence of patriotism at the Democratic National Convention and in the Harris campaign in general”?

It’s partly a genuine love for America that was suppressed for years and is only now finding its voice again. But it’s partly a promise that the progressive movement will return to its traditional approach of calling for America to be its best self, and that Democratic leaders will guide the movement back toward that approach.

Oprah and the Best of America

What does this new patriotism look like? Just listen to how Oprah Winfrey framed her case on Wednesday night:

“There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe, that there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer,” she said. “But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.”
“We know all the old tricks and tropes that are designed to distract us from what actually matters, but we are beyond ridiculous tweets and lies and foolery. These are complicated times, people, and they require adult conversation,” she added later. “And I welcome those conversations because civilized debate is vital to democracy, and it is the best of America.”
***

“More often than not, what I’ve witnessed and experienced are human beings, both conservative and liberal, who may not agree with each other, but who would still help you in a heartbeat if you were in trouble. These are the people who make me proud to say that I am an American.”
“They are the best of America,” she continued. “And despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them.”
And in a tongue-in-cheek jab at Vance’s now-viral 2021 critique of “childless cat ladies,” who he claimed wanted to make the country “miserable,” Winfrey—who is proudly unmarried and without children, and owns dogs—added: “And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”…
“I’ve always voted my values, and that is what is needed in this election, now more than ever,” Winfrey said. “Values and character matter most of all, in leadership and in life.” Winfrey called on fellow independents and undecideds to realize that “decency and respect are on the ballot in 2024. And just plain common sense.”
“So, let us choose,” Winfrey concluded. “Let us choose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to any individual, because that’s the best of America. And let us choose optimism over cynicism, because that’s the best of America. And let us choose inclusion over retribution. Let us choose common sense over nonsense, because that’s the best of America,” she said.

Exit take: It is impossible to imagine that speech being delivered at this year’s GOP convention.

“Freedom!”

It’s not just patriotism. The Democrats are also trying to take back the banner of “freedom,” from a Republican Party that has long portrayed itself as the defender of liberty. The shift in focus from “democracy” to “freedom” has been dramatic and will be fully on display Thursday night.

Harris on Monday took the stage for a surprise appearance to the rousing beat of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” her campaign’s unofficial anthem. She was preceded onstage by a nearly three-minute hype video set to the same song, with the narrator promising “freedom from control, freedom from extremism and fear.” Together, the night’s speakers referenced “freedom” more than 100 times. And on Wednesday, the convention’s entire program will be dedicated to the theme “A Fight for Our Freedoms.”

Other speakers have amplified the theme. Here’s Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro Wednesday night:

"While [former President Donald Trump] cloaks himself in the blanket of freedom, what he's offering isn't freedom at all," he said. "It's not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read. It's not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. And hear me on this. It sure as hell isn't freedom to say you can go vote but he gets to pick the winner. That's not freedom."

And VP nominee Tim Walz:

[T]his is a big part about what this election is about. Freedom.
When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor's office. Corporations free to pollute your air and water, and banks free to take advantage of customers.
But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own healthcare decisions and yeah, your kid's freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.

Notes historian Kevin Kruse: “The decision to focus on ‘freedom’ puts the focus not on the leader at some distance, but on the individual lives and immediate experiences of the voter. The focus isn’t on them; it’s on us. The question isn’t whether a Democratic candidate will win or lose; it’s what we’ll risk losing if the candidate does.”