The Flag Doesn’t End Our Arguments

Growing up in Philadelphia, Betsy Ross loomed large. Like countless schoolchildren, I visited her house on Arch Street. I loved the place. Whether Ross sewed the first flag is debated by historians, but the story hardly mattered. The lesson did. The flag represented a people becoming a nation.  Philadelphia was full of such reminders—Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Old City itself. They gave me an affection for the flag that has stayed with me ever since. I fly one at home, and few civic symbols command my admiration more. That is why every Flag Day I find myself thinking about a paradox.  Americans often describe the flag as a symbol of unity. We are told it brings us together and embodies our common values, history, and future. Yet its history is more complicated. The flag has rarely been a symbol of consensus. More often, it has been one of contestation.  Rebecca Burgess  recently argued  that Flag Day reminds Americans of both the blessings and the duties of citizenship, and she is right to emphasize duty. She invokes Calvin Coolidge, who described the flag not merely as an emblem of rights but of obligations. Self-government requires responsibility, citizenship requires sacrifice, and freedom depends on respect for law. But Americans have spent much of their history arguing over what those duties entail.  The flag emerged from revolution and became sacred through war—contested ever since by Americans with profoundly different visions of the nation. The Civil War offers the clearest example. Americans fought beneath rival flags, advancing competing understandings of liberty and union. Yet the reverence many feel toward the Stars and Stripes today owes much to that conflict. The flag became hallowed not because the nation was united, but because it was divided.  The same pattern recurs throughout our history. Immigrants saluted the flag as they entered American life. Civil-rights activists carried it while insisting that America live up to its founding promises. Protesters have burned it to challenge prevailing understandings of patriotism.  The argument has never really been about the cloth. It has always been about America. People are not debating a piece of fabric but national identity—arguing about what America is, what it asks of us, and what it ought to become.  Yet this is where most accounts of the flag stop. They observe the conflict and conclude that the flag has become divisive. I draw the opposite conclusion. Disagreement over the flag is evidence that Americans still care deeply about the nation it represents. The remarkable thing is not that Americans disagree about its meaning, but that Americans with dramatically different views of the country have always fought over it. Nobody argues over symbols they regard as irrelevant. People fight over symbols that matter.  Not every act of protest reflects attachment. Some who burn the flag mean to leave the country behind, not claim it. The test is not the heat of an argument but whether it is still addressed to America. The danger is not the citizen who shouts, but the one who stops arguing at all.  In an age of polarization, that shared claim is harder to sustain – and lately it has frayed in plain view. The flag’s long drift rightward has accelerated in recent years and become harder to ignore since the campus protests that followed October 7. To many on the left, it now reads not as a common inheritance but as the banner of a single politics, and some have stepped on it to make the point. A flag once claimed across the political spectrum is increasingly the property of one side and disowned by the other.  That asymmetry, not the argument, is the danger. A symbol every faction fights to claim can hold a divided people together; a symbol surrendered to one faction cannot. The tragedy is not Americans quarreling over the flag. It is half of them walking away from it.  American citizenship is itself an unfinished argument: we contest the meaning of the nation because we remain part of it. The flag’s purpose is not to end that argument but to give us a common object of loyalty that lets us disagree without disintegrating.  Flag Day arrives each year between Memorial Day and Independence Day, linking sacrifice with celebration. The Philadelphia of my childhood taught me to see the flag as a symbol of unity. The history embedded in those brick streets taught a harder lesson: Americans have always argued about what the nation means. The flag does not unite us by settling our arguments. It unites us only so long as rival Americans still insist it belongs to them too. Surrender it to one side, and we lose not a piece of cloth but the last ground our arguments share.  The post The Flag Doesn’t End Our Arguments appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .