Take Back the Flag

There were only a few U.S. flags on display in my neighborhood the weekend of our country’s 250th anniversary. Maybe it’s tired of doing too much work. Ever since the first version was stitched together, we have asked it, over and over, to mean something as it flutters off the beds of pickups and sweats on beer koozies and swim trunks and decorates front porches, government buildings, and office towers in great cities. A quarter of a millennium of the American experiment under that unifying symbol, and the question still worth asking as we look up beneath the fireworks is a simple one.

Whose flag is it?

For a decade now the answer has been allowed to default to one movement. MAGA took the flag in the same greedy way it has taken everything, loudly and without asking. The Trump movement wrapped itself in the cloth until half the country flinched at the sight of red, white, and blue on a front lawn. Democrats and progressives, however, are guilty of letting that happen. They ceded the most powerful symbol in American life to people who carried that same flag through the smashed windows of the Capitol, and then they wondered why voters believed the other side loved the country more.

I think we need to stop wondering and should get busy taking back our flag. We don’t need it as just a branding exercise because the honest history of this country says the flag belongs to the movement that actually built the America worth celebrating, and that movement was not conservative. It was liberal and progressive, and yes, it always has been.

Consider the accomplishments of liberal politics.

Women vote in this country because seventy years of progressive agitation, from Seneca Falls to the suffrage marches, dragged the 19th Amendment out of a reluctant nation in 1920. Black Americans vote because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed by a liberal Texan president who told his aides he was handing the South to the Republican Party for a generation and signed anyway. That is what public service looks like. LBJ was a man spending his own political fortune to enlarge the country’s freedom.

Your grandmother does not eat cat food in her old age because Franklin Roosevelt built Social Security in 1935 over the screaming objection of conservatives who called it socialism. She sees a doctor because Lyndon Johnson built Medicare in 1965 over the screaming objection of conservatives who called it socialism. They were wrong both times, and both programs are now so beloved that even the people who inherit that opposition must lie about their intentions to touch them.

The concept of the weekend itself is a progressive invention. The forty-hour week, the ban on child labor, the minimum wage, the legal right of workers to sit across a table from ownership and negotiate. Every one of those was won by the labor movement and its liberal allies, and every one was opposed at the time as an assault on liberty. My father, who worked an assembly line for 33 years, got health care, paid vacation, and a modest retirement pension because of his labor union, the United Auto Workers. The liberty in question during those struggles was really just the liberty of a twelve-year-old to lose his fingers while working in a Carolina textile mill.

The air over Los Angeles was once brown enough to taste. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. Liberals, though, wrote the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and created the EPA, and the smog lifted and the rivers ran clean enough for fish and children. Public schools, land grant universities, the GI Bill that built the postwar middle class, Pell Grants that opened college to the working poor. All of it progressive. All of it opposed.

And what about medicine? The National Institutes of Health, funded decade after decade by liberal majorities, gave this country the polio vaccine campaigns, the war on cancer, the antiretroviral drugs that turned AIDS from a death sentence into a managed condition. I am old enough to have had a few colleagues who died of AIDS. I recall when young men went home to small Texas towns to die and the government of the United States could barely say the name of the disease. Public research money, fought for by progressives, changed that. Lives measured in the tens of millions, extended and saved.

That’s two and a half centuries of accomplishments.

MAGA, in the meantime, has built nothing. What it has torn down is a daunting list. The movement offers grievance as a governing philosophy like the tariffs that function as a sales tax on working families. Or masked agents pulling people out of Home Depot parking lots. MAGA executes the dismantling of the research agencies that produced those medicines, the gutting of the EPA that cleaned the air, the legal harassment of the universities that educated three generations into upward trajectories. MAGA’s proposition is a story in which America was great once, before the wrong people showed up, and can be great again if we punish them.

The deliverance of that punishment appears to be the provenance of the Supreme Court, which was remade by three Trump appointments. Under the color of law in just the past weeks, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Injustices overturned ninety-one years of precedent and handed the president the power to fire the leadership of independent agencies, at will, converting the referees of American commerce into employees of one man. In Louisiana v. Callais, it raised the bar for proving racial discrimination in congressional redistricting so high that Alabama was permitted, within days, to run its 2026 elections on a map a lower court had already found racially discriminatory, a map that erases a majority-Black district and scatters its voters across three others. Think about that act more closely; examine its evil. The Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the Second Reconstruction, hollowed out by judges appointed by a man who lost the popular vote. The Court then erased the limits on coordinated party spending in campaigns, opening the money spigot wider heading into the midterms.

Yes, the Court rebuked Trump on birthright citizenship, six to three, and good for the majority. But there was no legal jiujitsu even the most skilled racist opinion writers might deliver to undo an obvious element of the Constitution. A president of the United States, though, had signed an order attempting to strip citizenship from babies born on American soil, a right written into the Constitution in blood after the Civil War, and it took eighteen months of litigation to stop him. The rebuke is hardly the story. The attempt is the story. Every lower court that looked at the order called it flatly unconstitutional and he pressed it to the top anyway, because the project for Trump and his sycophants is not law. Their project is the acquisition of power and expansive wealth.

And while that project runs, the till rings.

The financial disclosures released this week show the president took in more than two billion dollars last year. More than 1.4 billion of it flowed from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures, the meme coin bearing his name and the World Liberty Financial operation, businesses that barely existed before he retook office and that flourished precisely as his administration pulled back regulation of the industry. Reuters found the family’s crypto ventures generated roughly 2.3 billion in income while outside investors, more than a million of them, lost almost exactly the same amount. His net worth has nearly tripled since 2024. He flies on a 747 handed to him by the Qatari royal family and says he will keep it after he leaves office. A Gulf investment fund tied to a foreign government bought half of the family crypto firm for half a billion dollars while he was president-elect. There has never been a greater concept for influence peddling.

Set those actions against the tradition he defiles. George Washington refused a crown and refused a third term and went home to his farm. Harry Truman left the White House with an Army pension and drove himself back to Independence, Missouri, and declined corporate board seats because he would not sell the presidency. Jimmy Carter spent forty years after office swinging a hammer for people who would never own a house otherwise. Lyndon Johnson, whatever his sins, and they were many and manifest, used power to give things away. Voting rights. Medicare. Head Start. He died knowing the political cost and having paid it, looking across the Pedernales River from his ranch at the Stonewall, Texas schoolhouse where the first Head Start class was launched.

Trump uses power to take. That is the sum of what he is doing and we are watching as if we were helpless. The presidency, in his hands, is a licensing deal and the biggest royalty citizens of this country are paying might be the way our nation is shrinking from the world. The foreign aid apparatus that fed the hungry and fought AIDS across Africa has been dismantled. Alliances built over eighty years are treated as protection rackets. The research enterprise that made this country the magnet for the world’s best minds is being starved while those minds book flights elsewhere. For two and a half centuries the American flag meant something specific when it appeared abroad. It meant that somewhere across the ocean there was a country that, for all its hypocrisies, believed its ideals were for export. That meaning is being liquidated, the way everything else is being liquidated, for parts. A nation that stands for nothing abroad will soon stand for nothing at home. The two have never been separable.

These are just a few of the reasons we need to take back the flag. MAGA has turned it into a loyalty oath to one man. Instead, we should think of it as a receipt. I view it as the receipt for Seneca Falls and Selma, for the eight-hour day and the polio vaccine, for Social Security checks and clean rivers and the GI Bill and the moon. Every one of those achievements was progressive and every one was called radical and un-American at the time. Every one is now simply called America.

Democrats and the left must stop treating patriotism like a costume that does not fit. Fly the flag and mean it. Claim the Fourth and mean it. Say out loud that loving this country and demanding it keep its promises are the same act, and have been since Frederick Douglass stood up in 1852 and asked what the Fourth of July means to those left out of it. His answer was not despair. His answer was that the Constitution, honestly read, was a glorious liberty document, and the fight was to make the country obey its own founding.

That has always been our fight but this time the battle for our soul has been joined against people who care only about money and power and are running our government. What got them there was not one election among many. A movement that captures the courts, buys the referees, redraws the maps, and monetizes the office itself is not planning to lose gracefully. The window for stopping it through ordinary politics is open, but windows close. The midterms this fall are not about tax rates. They are about whether the machinery of self government survives in working order long enough to be handed to our kids.

The people who built the America worth loving should not whisper about it. The flag was ours all along and was sewn by the movements that expanded freedom, carried by the marchers who were beaten for it, planted on the moon by a program a liberal president launched. The other side borrowed it and hung it off a gallows on January 6th.

Two hundred fifty years in, the flag still belongs to whoever does the work of the founding, not the undoing of its principles. We all should go do the work required to sustain freedom and our democratic republic, and we need to carry the flag with us.