July 4 is the big occasion for Americans to express patriotism, none more so than this year, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. But the ways we do so are as diverse as the country. People and groups from right to left celebrate in conflicting ways and with conflicting views—from “love it or leave it” to “love it and fix it.”

This year as a time when democracy itself is under serious threat, progressives are seeking ways to claim their patriotism and recapture the flag.

“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” wrote Zohran Mamdani last July 4 before he had been elected mayor of New York City. “I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”

Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking, rejecting blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism. Democratic movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—sought to overturn the established order while claiming to fulfill America’s promise. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.

Even the founders would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state.

As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”.

Donald Trump consciously and cynically has been re-enacting the long tradition of patriotism as jingoism, nationalism, flag waving, and “America first” sloganeering. What seems new is his systematic drive to debase major symbols of national identity—such as the White House, the reflecting pool, and Arlington Cemetery—while wrecking the entire national plan to celebrate America at 250.

Although they disagreed on many issues, the founders were adamant that they didn’t want the country to be run by an all-powerful king. Yet here we are 250 year later, governed by a president publicly claiming such power, with a Supreme Court majority acting as his enablers,

Of course, many of the founders were skeptical of a robust democracy. They created institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, that were never intended to completely reflect the voice of the people.

Even the founders, however, would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state, exploiting the opportunities provided by the Constitution’s elitist features.

The Gallup poll regularly asks Americans what the founders would think of America today. This year, only 19% think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased with how the country has turned out. Over three quarters (77%) now say the founders would be disappointed. This compares with 42% in 2001.

Americans’ disappointment with the country is obviously tied to Trump’s performance and his low favorability ratings in the polls. We expect our nation’s leaders, especially our president, to express a deep loyalty to a vision bigger than one person. But Trump has no overarching vision. Besides grabbing power and wealth for himself, his major commitment appears to white nationalism—turning America into a country for the uber rich and white people only. In contrast to the patriotism expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Trump wants, to rid the nation of immigrants of color, whom, in his eugenicist view, he thinks “pollute” the country with bad genes.

Trump and his coterie have systematically acted to undermine the spirit and letter of the Constitution. One of America’s core beliefs since its founding has been that elections should determine who becomes president and that it is important to ensure the orderly transfer of power. But insurrectionists at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—urged on by and loyal to Trump— attempted to stop that process, while. carrying American flags. Many of these were convicted and sentenced for insurrectionary crimes. Trump’s blanket pardon and embrace of the convicted was an announcement of his autocratic hopes and plans.

As the 250th anniversary approaches, Trump is intensifying his campaign to end the right to vote—the fundamental idea of the American Revolution. Abetted by the Supreme Court majority’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act (a key victory of the 1960s), and building on the ongoing GOP campaign to maintain power as they lose their capacity to win the national popular vote, Trump is trying to undermine states’ control over the electoral process.

He’s used his powers to eviscerate other cherished rights, including free speech, a free press, and freedom of assembly and dissent. He has used the tools of government—including the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS—to unleash his revenge on protesters, the media, immigrants, Democrats, and all others he considers his opponents.

Right wingers have always wrapped themselves in the flag under the guise of being the true patriots. ‘”Americanism” campaigns in the early 20th century were designed to undermine the labor movement and limit immigration. Congressional and state legislative “Unamerican Activities” committees collaborated with the FBI beginning in the 1930s, to build blacklists against leftwing activists and artists,

Even American Nazis sought to be seen as patriots. On Feb. 20, 1939, 20,000 of them filled Madison Square Garden for a "Pro-America Rally." They erected a massive 30-foot banner of George Washington (it was timed to celebrate his birthday) surrounded by American flags and swastika banners.

Trump’s own MAGA rallies feel like modern-day versions of that Nazi event. He fetishizes the American flag and other patriotic symbols, even while displaying a shallow, ahistorical, and bizarre understanding of what they meant.

Once, at a campaign rally in Tampa, as his cult followers chanted, “Build that wall,” Trump interrupted his speech to give a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him.

“We want to make sure that anyone who seeks to join our country, shares our values and has the capacity to love our people,” Trump said at a rally at the Kennedy Center in 2017.

“We all salute the same great American flag,” Trump said in his 2017 inauguration address—a line he has repeated in many speeches since then.

To Trump and his followers, the flag is synonymous with “America First.” It was a slogan used to unite isolationists and Nazi sympathizers against involvement in the European war in 1939. For Trump, it means reporting undocumented immigrants and caging their children in detention centers, restricting visitors from Muslim countries, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and other international agreements, and engaging in friendships with like-minded dictators.

Trump’s faux patriotism and its clownish griftiness has been providing a wide space for coalitions of resistance. The “No Kings” protests and the slogan itself help provide a very fitting frame for revitalizing a progressive, democratic, populist patriotism. Many participants waved American flags.

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance.

President Barack Obama said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”

President Joe Biden said that “we’re all part of a chain of patriots” who fought for democracy, freedom, fair play, peace, security, and opportunity. Patriots, he explained, seek “the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come; the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given talent can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”

In the Sixties, as hundreds of thousands of American youth were radicalized by the senseless Vietnam war, resistance included acts of defiance of patriotic symbols and rhetoric. Flag burnings would sometimes combine with the burning of draft cards. But other radicals took a different stance. In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the rather moribund Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”

"It was as a Socialist, and because I was a Socialist, that I fell in love with America,” wrote Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, in his 1973 book, Fragments of a Century. “In saying that, I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a Socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”

Harrington was identifying with the many radicals and progressive reformers who proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America promised democratic fulfillment—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech, and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and people of color, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

It is largely underrecognized that some of the most important and popular ways all Americans experience and express patriotism were the creation of radical writers and artists. What they created continues to inspire.

Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist who lived from 1855 to 1931, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to express his outrage at the Gilded Age’s widening economic divide. He had been ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist, and for his work among the It was the Gilded Age, an era marked by major political, economic, and social conflicts. Progressive reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers were joining forces in the so-called Populist movement to rein in the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Socialists and other leftist radicals were gaining new converts.

In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and the argument that it was spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups across the country were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—who were cast as polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance not to the American but to the Confederate flag.

Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two bestselling socialistic books, Looking Backward and Equality, believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped that the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he argued was undermining the........

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