The relationship of many American leftists to patriotism reminds me a lot of those guys who grow up in oppressively evangelical communities and decide to express their disillusionment with it by becoming black metal satanists - a oppositional mirror of Christianity - instead of becoming atheists.
Like the correct response to the realization that nationalism is a false consciousness used to suppress class conflict is to focus on raising class consciousness not to root against the nation everyone around you is rooting for.
Flag burning anti-patriotism is stupid in the exact same way that jingoistic chauvinism is stupid but it's also stupid in an additional self-defeating way because it sets your goals up in opposition to a bunch of symbols and institutions that normies have been trained their whole life to believe in.
Nations are lines someone drew on maps and flags are pieces of cloth. Made up! Don't get mad at something that's made up especially if it's also alienating people that you need to reach for no good reason!
Ya I feel sometimes like this stuff is the foreign policy equivalent of those straight edge punks who'd tattoo X's on their hands or whatever bsky.app/profile/thre...
"have you ever considered how many people in the united states see the united states flag as an irredeemable symbol of profound evil" like, yes, and the number is "extremely few" which is why setting yourself up against it is insane bsky.app/profile/nacl...
ever consider how many people look at that flag and see mammon, a beast that hates them, a monster that has killed and harmed their families? those are the people our struggle is for. blessed are the meek, jackass
Garrison believed entering politics would dilute second wave abolitionism’s commitment to both ending slavery and achieving citizenship for African Americans. Douglass concluded that politics were the only way to achieve any of those things.
Yep. And an orientation toward politics also meant rejecting Garrison’s disdain for symbols of the American republic, as justified as that disdain was.
The pro-Constitution abolitionists (Douglass, Goodell, Spooner) also made (what I find to be, at least) the clever and interesting move of taking the Constitution at its word and seriously as a text
It never mentions slavery but does specifically say it is intended to “secure the blessings of liberty.” to loosely paraphrase Douglass, why would abolitionists do the work of giving force to the secret wickedness in the hearts of the pro-slavery Framers if they couldn’t be bothered to write it
Effectively they were invoking the Somersett case of 1772, which said slavery was so against the natural order of things that it could only be sustained by positive law. Under that reading, the Constitution’s silence gave no federal support to slavery (whatever the founders’ intent in that).
Yes, so this is exactly the point: context matters. If you're running for office you probably shouldn't burn the flag on the debate stage. But the main point of protest is to cause discomfort and generate media coverage, so it seems a reasonable tactic in that context.
the point of protest may be to cause discomfort and generate attention but the goal is still to persuade a broader public that may be initially unsympathetic
Yeah, the interesting problem of trying to read Douglass at face value is that he was Machiavellian in the Straussian sense — his embrace of the Constitution was tactical, and even though his reasoning is very defensible it’s not clear to me he ever truly believed it.
We got the New Deal out of it & we did beat Mussolini & Hitler. Communists & leftists of the Popular Front period did get blacklisted, but I saw that as being set in motion after V-E and V-J Day, not b/c anybody did anything tactically wrong in the 1930s.
Others have addressed the question, I’m just here to plug David Blight’s book
The Garrisonians gave Douglass his platform to become a famous public intellectual, and his break w Garrison on the redeemability of the republic & 1789 constitution got very heated
www.goodreads.com/book/show/38...
This.
On the merits, it's easy to disagree with Douglass's characterization of the US Constitution (long before the Reconstruction amendments) as a glorious liberty document.
But from a political standpoint, Douglass was clearly right to claim this.
The short documentary I just watched on the Niagara Movement on PBS kinda implied that he was a really difficult person to try to come to a consensus with, unless the views you held were exactly aligned with his own.
Somewhat inflexible in thought would be a generous way of describing him.
He began or always saw the world as either with or against me. I always wonder if he had oppositional disorder or PTSD.
There is no way folks got away from this work with mental health intact.
