Are the Symbols of American Patriotism All Right-Wing?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 23, 2024

 

You have to get up pretty early to beat Dan McLaughlin to a take on a story that involves both the history of the early American Republic and the courts. And when you do, you find out that he already wrote it up and published it the night before.

 

Dan’s latest is a definitive articulation of why the New York Times’ follow-up to its turkey of a hit piece involving Sam Alito’s wife’s decision to fly an upside-down American flag in some proximity to the events of January 6 — this time, the attack centers on the sordid allegation that the Alitos also flew the Revolutionary War-era “Appeal to Heaven” flag — is another dud. He explains with near saintly patience the flag’s historical genesis, its provenance through the years, and why American patriots maintain a level of reverence for it. But space did not allow Dan to dwell on the abject mania that overtook critics of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices upon the story’s publication in the Times.

 

Just as the Court’s detractors displayed rank opportunism in reacting to the upside-down flag contretemps by calling for Alito to recuse himself from future cases in which the Left has an interest in certain outcomes — the conservative justices’ sins change but Democrats’ remedy remains the same — some alleged that the “Appeal to Heaven” flag is today so tarnished that its admirers must be drummed out of public life.

 

“This incident is yet another example of apparent ethical misconduct by a sitting justice,” said Senator Dick Durbin. That’s right, “misconduct!” Durbin alleged that the flying of the flag “adds to the Court’s ongoing ethical crisis,” and Alito must, therefore, recuse himself from all cases relating to the 2020 election and January 6. “Recusal isn’t enough,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson declared. “He needs to get off the bench. Resign or be impeached.” The CBS Evening News put together a video package in which it alleged that the flag in question is “linked to the January 6 insurrection” because precisely two people brought it, among many other symbols of the American Revolution, with them to the site of the riot. It “became a symbol of support for Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ campaign to overturn the 2020 election,” anchor Norah O’Donnell dubiously alleged.

 

Personally, my favorite rejoinder to my late-night dismissal of the supposed controversy around this flag came to me via social media, in which one observer reacted incredulously toward the notion that the flag appeals to American history buffs. “You’re going with ‘they are just huge fans of the (1700s) Revolution, that’s all?’” I was asked.

 

. . . Yes?

 

Why is that even remotely hard to believe? It’s not just the charitable explanation for the Alitos’ vexillological preferences. It’s the most likely explanation.

 

“He’s a real history buff,” one of Alito’s longtime clerks, Hannah Smith, told CSPAN interviewers in 2005 following his nomination to the Supreme Court bench. “I believe that was his major focus of some of his studies in college. He majored in history.” Indeed, “he loved history, and so when you look at his bookshelves, you’ll see a lot of history books.”

 

Not only is the justice a historian by academic training, Alito is an originalist justice who spends most of his time thinking about the Constitution’s framers outlook, predisposition, intent, and the environmental factors contributing to their political and legal philosophies. It would be bizarre if Alito was not affected by the symbols of the American Revolution. We expect dispassion and objectivity from Supreme Court justices, but not when it comes to their love of country.

 

But perhaps that outlook is increasingly exclusive to the American right. After all, Democrats and their allies on the Left habitually seek to impugn the symbols of the American Founding when those symbols appear in Republican voters’ hands.

 

In the Tea Party movement’s earliest manifestations, when its members explicitly appealed to the Founding documents in their advocacy for a restoration of constitutional norms and circumspect governance, the Gadsden Flag and its slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me,” was suddenly branded a symbol of hate. “It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context,” the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined when it was forced to adjudicate the claim that the Gadsden Flag was “racist.” And yet, it can be “sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts.” That interpretation is exclusive to the Left, and the allegation’s origins accompanied the Democratic political imperative around anathematizing the Tea Party movement with the aim of neutralizing its political potency.

 

Betsy Ross’s famous American flag — with its 13 stars arranged in a circle on a blue field — is similarly suspect. As a result of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s unfailingly ignorant advocacy, Nike was compelled in 2019 to pull a shoe that featured the flag from the market. As PBS reported at the time, “some extremist groups appear to have appropriated the flag.” Nike sheepishly explained that the design “could unintentionally offend and detract from the nation’s patriotic holiday.” What’s offensive is the naked attempt to detract from “the nation’s patriotic holiday” by extirpation from the public square the icons and insignias revered by American patriots.

 

The Times’ attack on the “Appeal to Heaven” flag is of a piece with this effort. Observers could be forgiven for concluding that the American Left is dead set on convincing their fellow countrymen that the symbols of American patriotism are all right-wing coded. Well, if they insist. That’s a truly generous and entirely unreciprocated dispensation. If that’s the Democratic left’s opinion, who are Republicans to argue with it?