We’ve reached, amid the LA uprising, my favorite stage of every grassroots protest: the one where a phalanx of middle-to-upper-middle-class liberals start giving out unsolicited PR advice. This time around, some pictures of protesters waving Mexican flags has prompted recommendations that they use American flags instead:
If this sounds familiar, you may remember it from stuff like Michael Tracey’s absurd argument that Bernie Sanders lost because he didn’t wear an American flag pin. What I always find striking about this advice is the way it’s always presented as an obvious truism that only the truly ignorant or an ideological zealot could possibly object to. Tracey says this is “so simple”; Kruse says it is “basic political messaging”. Didn’t you get the memo?
As it turns out, there’s good empirical evidence that American flag waving is in fact a very bad idea for the American left. From PubMed:
We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants…
The effect here was truly extraordinary: in one test all it took was placing a little picture of an American flag in the top-left corner of one of their testing materials to significantly shift voting intentions towards the GOP. In another, test-takers who saw a photo with American flags reported political beliefs significantly further to the right than those who saw a photo where the flags had been edited out.
According to the just-so ideology of liberal patriotism, this simply shouldn’t happen, because the flag itself is politically neutral. It has nothing to do with nationalism or xenophobia or tribalism or any other such problems; it just represents benign and wholesome sentiments like “I love apple pie” and “baseball is my favorite passtime.”
But the problem, as the internationalist left has long pointed out, is that even “merely patriotic” iconography still divides humanity up into insiders and outsiders. It invites us to have some special affection or feeling towards others based not on who they are, but on their proximity or their position within utterly artificial geographic borders. In this sense, it shares one of the core sins of nationalism: both are deeply identitarian politics. They invite a politics of division rather than the unifying politics of class and humanitarianism.
In that light, it’s not surprising that Mexican flags would incite this kind of reaction from folks like Kruse. Patriotism is a scourge everywhere, and you don’t defeat it by substituting one patriotism for another.
I have zero interest in telling the folks in LA right now how to brand themselves; it’s futile, and this kind of advice usually just ends up contributing to the cloud of suspicion and scandal that the right always tries to gin up over protesters. But having said that, if it were me and I had to pick a flag, I would go with the UNs, or perhaps something with socialist iconography. If socialists want to avoid the political traps of patriotic messaging, the best way we can do it is to openly ally ourselves with the workers of the world. They are, after all, who we truly represent.
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