It's Flag Day in America

Or, No Kings Day for some

I think I’ve been pretty clear here that I’m a libertarian. That’s small “l” because I can’t be a member of a political party that regularly violates its principles for electoral gain. Chase Oliver, seriously? I feel the same way about the Democrat and Republican parties. Hence why I’m a nonpartisan libertarian.

I’m also an evangelical Christian (I think I’ve also been honest about that), which means I don’t worship anything other than God, and that includes the country I live in. I like living in America, I would fight against an invading force. I just don’t have an illusions about what it is…or what it is not.

So when I approach Flag Day every year, I’m always double-minded. On the one hand, flags can represent groups or abstract ideals, which is fine if the groups are voluntary, but not so good if some group members are forced to belong. That flag (of whatever group) represents a forced identity and probably comes with service obligations. Think Nazi flags! Individualists should despise flags that represent forced identity because it represents a form of slavery.

Fruit Depends on the Roots

Flag Day has an odd history. Originally proclaimed by progressive fascist president Woodrow Wilson in 1916, it’s a bit like the Pledge of Allegiance which was invented in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a socialist who falsely preached Jesus was socialist too.

Non-Christians generally think you can ascribe to Jesus whatever qualities you find admirable and it’s just fine to make stuff up. Those of us who don’t just cherry-pick Jesus’ biblical statements don’t think He was a socialist because He wasn’t a socialist. He also wasn’t a capitalist. Trying to define God by human terms is an exercise in futility…and dishonesty.

Like most American schoolchildren, I was obliged to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance avowing American exceptionalism. Both my parents were subjected to this ritual as well. I think it was designed to make us patriotic in that rabid way we see in communist countries, but it just made me question what “indivisible” meant since I live in a secessionist state. A couple of decades after Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation, the Supreme Court wisely ruled the 1st Amendment prohibited American governments from imposing such professions of faith.

Faith, You Say?

Yes, faith. I didn’t recognize it as such until I became a Christian and I realized that the Pledge calls me to believe in something greater than myself and far inferior to God Himself. I’m vowing to support the United States government no matter what its doing and no matter who is in office. I sometimes struggle to defend God’s actions Whose motivations are so far over my intellectual capacity, but I feel confident that when I no longer see the veil darkly, it’ll make sense. But can I defend the actions of the US military in Vietnam or the Middle East with the same assurance that it’ll make sense someday? No, I can’t do that. There are too many humans in the United States government for me to feel comfortable with that sort of fealty.

Symbol of a Nation

A national flag, usually attached to a territory, can also symbolize an ideal. Many Americans look at their flag that way. Woodrow Wilson believed the Stars and Stripes represented “liberty and justice.” Obviously, not everyone shared his conception of liberty or justice. especially the victims of eugenics which was first legislated under his governorship in New Jersey. For a fuller article on Woodrow Wilson’s, uh, foibles, go here.

The only way an official flag can be truly representative of everybody in a territory is to represent a common ideal shared by almost everybody in that territory and with some means to opt out of ideals that aren’t yours. A common ideal necessarily excludes victims of public discrimination or exploitation. From a libertarian or classical liberal perspective, a national or territorial flag can be respectable only if it symbolizes an ideal of equal liberty.

Should we expect people exploited or discriminated against by their government to worship that government’s flag? That’s asking too much. Strangely, many individuals do just that. It’s what Bertrand de Jouvenel called “the mystery of civil obedience”. People love the country they live in even when that country treats them poorly.

The United States flag has been a symbol of freedom as the troops carrying it liberated countries around the world. It has also been a symbol of oppression for some countries and even for our own citizens. There are Americans who view their citizenship as a forced identity and they’d rather be someone else.

And that’s fine. You do you, boo! There are airlines going to lots of places all over the world everyday. Get on one and go, see if you can convince the country you go to to allow you to stay and become a citizen. Few countries have a more generous immigration policy than the United States, but you might be able to accomplish your goals.

Meanwhile, few countries offer the same level of peaceful societal interaction as America does, so I hope you find your bliss wherever you land, but I probably won’t be going with you.

I distrust our government, but I balance that with common sense knowledge that it’s probably among the best of a bad bunch. It could be better.

Waving the Flag

I stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to be respectful to the people around me, but I don’t put my hand over my heart and I don’t recite the Pledge. If you drove by my house, you’d see an Alaskan flag and a lady bug banner (both topics for another time) hanging from my porch. It’s not that I hate my country. I love the diverse American social landscape and the commonsense people of my country. I’m just don’t think the government is God or even god-like so I’m not worshipping it by hanging a multi-colored piece of cloth from my porch. And the more you try to convince me I should, the more likely I am to display an Alaskan flag because it’s entirely peaceful, created by an 11-year-old kid, and it’s never tried to invade Canada.

But this week saw an ominous turn with flavors of 2020 and color revolutions around the globe.

That image sent a chill down my spine. I had to ask myself — what does the flag of Mexico symbolize for me, especially backdropped by the smoke and fire of burning American-owned property on American soil bought and paid for by the taxpayers of the United States well over a century ago?

Did you know that American paid for the former Spanish Empire land that is now part of the United States? It’s wasn’t stolen. It was bought, just like Alaska. Now, if you want to argue about Hawaii….

Mexico is the 15th largest economy in the world that’s largest export is migrants to America. It’s also, ironically, a semi-failed narcotics state run by an avowed socialist who just promised to “mobilize” the country’s people against the United States and, then, an anti-ICE protest turns into a violent riot on the streets of our largest city within the same day that pallets of cinderblocks showed up next to the LA federal building.

The flag of Mexico stands for uncertainty in government, periodic violent clashes between groups, drug manufacturing, and people fleeing the country to find work other places while insisting upon not assimiliating into the culture of the place they’ve moved to.

And now, the flag symbolizes an invasion and a fomenting revolution.

It says “we’re here, Americans. We were invited illegally by a former president who was losing his mind, and we’re not going anywhere unless you make us. We’re going to take your kids’ jobs and we hope eventually to turn your country into the same semi-failed state we left because we are La Raza, deserving to be here while you — whose families may have been here several generations—are not.”

This isn’t about peaceful immigration and a multiculture society. My grandfather immigrated from Sweden in 1906. He came here peacefully, hat in hand, just asking for a chance to succeed. He married the daughter of Swedish immigrants. My father and his siblings grew up speaking Swedish at home, but their parents insisted they speak English everywhere else. They were raised to be Americans, taught their Swedish culture as a family and sometimes community activity, but not as something you imposed upon non-Swedes.

But the symbolism of that photo…I’ve rarely seen an image that says “I’m going to impose my culture upon the resident population” quite so much as that photo. There’s something about setting fire to other people’s property that just SCREAMS

“I don’t care about your rights and I intend to CRUSH you.”

Ideals to Build On

In America, and in many Western countries, we still have hope for the ideal of individual liberty and secure property rights, which are absolutely needed to prevent continuing clashes between individuals and their beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles. You’re not going to find that sort of hope in Mexico or most other countries of the global south. What you find there is violence, fraudulent elections, grift on a grand scale, and impose juntas to establish false peace.

To many of my libertarian friends, open borders sound like a wonderful ideal. They view all people as equal and national boundaries as mere lines on the map. At a philosophical level, I agree with them. I actually may know more immigrants than the average American, (but again, another topic for another article).

When the practical side of me looks at a photo like that, combined with my research into the countries of South America, and I think “Open borders were a terrible idea.” My mother’s Wyandot Indian ancestors would have agreed. If they’d only known the future and could have stopped Europeans from coming here 400 years ago when there were just a few of them, they would have done so. Instead they welcomed them — because there were only a few — and then there were many and then the Wyandot were displaced and put on a reservation in Oklahoma. They missed their shot to stop the invasion a long time before they and the collective tribal populations became the minority in what would become the United States.

A little known fact is the Mexican government originally based its constitution on the US Constitution. That was very common back in those days. American had a successful revolution and formed a country that didn’t suck. A lot of countries thought they could replicate the experiment. A few succeeded. Some fell to chopping off heads. There were a lot of semi-failures in between and Mexico is one of them. Torn by wide swings in governance, mired in public-sector corruption, providing a nice lifestyle for some and deep poverty for others, Mexico exports its citizens to come to America to take jobs low-skilled Americans could and would take if they paid more than welfare does, but since Mexicans are in those jobs, they don’t pay more and they aren’t available anyway. So those Americans who still have jobs must provide government benefits for the Americans who aren’t working because Mexican migrants have taken the jobs that otherwise would have employed them, and then they also must provide education, health care, housing assistance and a lot more to the Mexican migrants who entered the country without our permission and send home to Mexico $63 billion in a year in transfer remittances. It is one of the largest sectors of the Mexican economy and it’s made possible because migrants pay no income tax, rarely pay for their own medical care, and the American taxpayer educates their children for them. We have absorbed over 10% of our resident population in illegal migrants in just four years, on top of our 15% of legal immigrants.

That is not sustainable and I think we need to ask ourselves a very salient question. Do we want to see that flag flying over all of our cities in the near future? Do we really think that will provide the dignified trustworthy society we want for our children and grandchildren? Just take a look at Europe and I think the honest answer is —

Well, no, of course not.

A New View

I’m still not going to Pledge to the Flag, but I’m starting to have a greater understanding of why it matters. We plant flags to establish that this is our territory. It’s our home, the place we consider worth defending. And yeah, I would defend my home from an invasion and, well, 20 million migrants pushing across the border over the last four years sure looked like an invasion and Los Angeles sure looks like the invasion has become violent — which means it’s a revolution.

As a libertarian, I have a philosophical affinity to the idea of “no kings. Not “no rules” because you can’t have society without some rules to prevent us from infringing upon one another, but no rulers—the actual meaning of anarchy. It’s a worthy goal to strive for and discuss. We’d all live in more peaceful societies if we stopped forming governments to impose tyranny on ourselves and others.

Clearly we aren’t there yet because tyrannical thugs are setting other people’s property on fire in some of our major cities. We can never have an anarchist society until we all accept we can’t have what belongs to the other guy unless we are willing to engage in peaceful exchange. We can’t invade a neighboring country (or district) and suck up all its resources and think the invaded aren’t going to feel…invaded.

This is why we form governments that create borders and processes for crossing that border in an orderly, permission-based way. If you can’t handle something so fairly simple and then you think being told to leave gives you a right to destroy property that doesn’t belong to you…well, that’s an invasion and invasions are one of the reasons we form governments.

I may not pledge allegiance to flags, but I know which one I’d rather stand under. I’d rather live in a relatively peaceful country that gets some things wrong than a semi-failed that mobilizes its citizens to invade another country and then insist its invading citizens have a right to remain there or else burn the country down.