Stars and Stripes

Should we use the flag? By Luke Pickrell

To reframe the conversation around the need for a new democratic founding, we need our own symbols and slogans. In that vein, we’ve created “Project 2026” stickers to put a democratic republican spin on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Like the “We Need a Democratic Constitution” buttons, the stickers aim to spread our ideas beyond the blogosphere and into everyday life.

One of the new stickers combines the flag with “We Need a Democratic Constitution.” Given everything that has been and continues to be done in the name of America, this combination initially made me uneasy.

But here’s why it’s worth a shot.

Neither I nor anyone else knows what symbols a future movement for a democratic political system will use. (It probably won’t be the hammer and sickle — nor should we waste time trying to rehabilitate Soviet iconography for a 21st-century audience.) Maybe the movement will reject the flag as irredeemably tainted by State Department patriotism and the worst aspects of our history. In that case, defenders of the current Constitution would likely have hegemony over the flag. Most people on the left probably don’t have an issue with this hypothetical: the opposition can have it.

But I don’t think we can escape the flag. Nor should we necessarily try.

If we’re clear that we want a new constitution based on unicameral legislative supremacy and universal and equal rights, then using the flag does not compromise or dilute our message. It would be a glaring contradiction to support the flag as embodying the worst aspects of America — empire, colonization, inequality — while fighting for a genuinely democratic political system. When the flag is used to signal a break with that history and point towards something better, it becomes contested terrain. And contesting it is worthwhile.

No one else is demanding a democratic constitution. If we root our politics in a clear declaration of universal and equal rights, we don’t need to fear appropriation by Republicans, Democrats, or anyone else. The ideological clarity of democracy protects us from the worst elements of “USA-ness,” while embracing the best parts of our history — the Civil War, Reconstruction, women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, and so on — and expanding the reach of our arguments to millions of small-d democrats.

To succeed, our ideas must become as widespread as the Stars and Stripes. Let’s see what sticks.