The Flag Furor Is an Appeal to Stupidity

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, May 23, 2024

 

When considering how a given political claim is likely to fare once it has traveled outside of the bubble in which it originated, my go-to yardstick is to imagine the reception that it would receive in an average American bar. Given recent events, I have grown tempted to shift the setting of this admirably dependable test elsewhere — say, to the lunchroom of a high-security lunatic asylum.

 

For people who spend too much time debating politics or surfing the internet — or, heaven forfend, doing both at the same time — engagement with the real world can present something of a shock. I have, on a handful of occasions, found myself trying to convey to one of the more normal members of my family the details of some controversy or other that has flared up on Politics Twitter or in the ideological press and realizing, almost immediately, that I look like a kook. Out come the words — “It all started when @sidewayspolicy told @granulartax that . . .” — and with them comes the stark recognition that nobody outside of a small clique could ever, or should ever, care one whit about what I’m saying. If you’re curious, you can try it yourself. Walk down the road to Al’s, order a drink, and start outlining one of the fashionable notions that has taken the web by storm. I guarantee that, before you’ve so much as finished your first sentence, you will see the first eyebrow go up.

 

I note all this because I think it’s important for someone to say more bluntly what both Noah and Dan have strongly implied in these pages, which is that the three people who wrote the New York Times‘ preposterous story about Justice Alito’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag, and the many others who are now busily selling that story, are . . . how to put it? Ah, yes: They’re out of their goddamn minds. Would you like some more adjectives? I can oblige. They’re crazy. They’re nuts. They’re barmy. They’re bonkers. They are so far gone into the malleable lore of the Progressive Cinematic Universe that they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality.

 

Can you picture this conversation at the bar?

 

“Yeah, you know that Justice Alito? Yeah, he’s got to recuse himself, right.”
“Who?”
“Justice Alito. On the Supreme Court. He’s got to step aside.”
“Oh, really. Why?”
“He flew a flag at his house.”
“A flag?”
“Yeah, he flew a flag. It was popular during the American Revolution. Obviously, he can’t do his job properly now.”

 

I’d pay to see it.

 

Bill Kristol, who has apparently decided to spend his 70s publishing every single half-baked thought that pops into his head, has come overnight to consider the “Appeal to Heaven” flag to be a terrible symbol “whose spirit is hostile to the constitutional order and the rule of law that the Supreme Court is to uphold.” Which — here’s another one — is absolutely ludicrous. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, as Dan McLaughlin notes, was commissioned by George Washington, the man who, among many other things, presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and then served two terms as the first president of the United States. Insofar as that flag makes any intrinsic comment on America’s “constitutional order and the rule of law,” it serves as a resounding affirmation of it — which is why it was used so prominently in HBO’s wonderful 2008 historical drama, John Adams. Having been designed in 1775, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag has existed for 249 years — for longer than America has been an independent nation. Justice Alito, a known history buff, is 74 years old. To believe that his motivation in flying it was to indicate public support for the events of January 6, 2021, is presentism of the worst and dippiest kind.

 

It is also unimaginably cynical. The purpose of the Times‘ flag story is to discredit Justice Alito, along with the Supreme Court more broadly, and thereby to make it easier for the Court to be manipulated, bullied, or packed by “living constitutionalists.” I know this. You know this. The people who are echoing this stupidity know this, too. This is a game, a ploy, a ruse. It is the latest move in a scheme that was hatched right about the time that progressives started losing cases, and will continue right up to the point at which they start winning them again. That none of the allegations have had any substance beneath them is beside the point; what matters is that they can be added to over time, referred back to as if they are part of some meaningful whole, and then used, as the New York Times dutifully does, to suggest that “the justice recuse himself.” The answer must be no — and that sound you can hear in the distance, at the border where politics meets real life, is the contemptuous laughter of the crowd.