Comment on Pandering to conservative Americans
CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafe 1 week agoThe American flag is very politically charged atm. Honestly. By & large the left hates the American flag, see below “I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a B&W American flag”. They hate the flag displayed, and they hate the people who wear it.
This isn’t a new or fringe sentiment; see it in this 4 year old YT video.
The left has surrendered their claim to the American flag. A couple years ago there were some TikTok videos saying “if there was an American flag at their house they some racist ass white motherfuckers”.
Here’s a woman appearing to bemoan that fact, saying that we’re all Americans & all should fly the flag.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah it’s a bad rhetorical position to have backed ourselves into, but also yeah we’re certainly there. I think the 00s really did it with the flag waving support our troops leading to defense of torture and dismissal of war crimes. By that point it was hard to be proud to be an American and rather than join a national conversation about what we’d done, the right saw us recoil in horror and advanced. They screamed “love it or leave it” and asserted that America was the best. By the time the disaster of the war on terror really hit them they owned the cultural perception of “patriotism” and “America fuck yeah”. They then descended into conspiracy to explain it, the most recent contrapoints video was quite compelling on that discussion.
The left has been doing some work to reclaim it. Shermanposting is very much an example, but reclaiming national pride is hard in the face of a nationalist movement. Our history is such a mix of good and bad and when you’re committed to reality it’s hard to reclaim the flag waving position, especially when it’s gotten so bad your national value of liberty has become a fascist buzzword and the country has ruined most of its goodwill internationally.