From “Freedom Day Parade” (1974) by Wakefield Poole.
With Independence Day happening today, the Post-Democrat hopes that in some capacity you can lay off from thinking about the latest headlines. So without thinking about the complete chaos coming up with the DNC convention, let’s go back to 2008. Dennis Kucinich, a brief primary candidate that year, gave his own fiery speech seemingly left-of-field from what party heads were engrossed in doing. Here’s just a short part of the transcript:
“Wake up, America! The insurance companies took over healthcare. Wake up, America! The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America! The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America! They want your Social Security. Wake up, America! Multinational corporations took over our trade policies. Factories are closing. Good paying jobs are
Dennis Kucinich “Wake Up America!” Speech.
being lost. Wake up, America! We went into Iraq for oil. The oil companies want more. War against Iran will mean $10-a-gallon gasoline. The oil administration, they want to drill more, into your wallet. Wake up, America! Contractors want more. Those war contractors want more. An Iran war will cost $5 to $10 trillion…”
What Kucinich did was genius. He was able to both criticize everything wrong with this country, both what we were doing home and abroad that was morally wrong, and yet with that line “Wake up, America!” it made the speech about everyone, or “we the people” more like it, rather than just one man throwing insults at his country. He only briefly acknowledged the candidate or the election, but managed to rile up the convention’s audience like no other. Not to mention, the shots of the audience cheering include many with at least small patriotic emblems (and at least one seemingly covered head to toe).
But oh how things have changed. Kucinich himself is now something of a case study, going from his eccentric urban-populist roots in Cleveland to being a frequent on Fox News and the facepalm-inducing campaign manager for RFK Jr. But his right-wing turn aside, the larger problem has to do with rhetoric and optics on the Left. “Left” I’m defining pretty broadly here, but we never see this kind of energy through the Democratic party or how involved the typical American could feel with the party through energy like his. Today, not only do conservatives try using fake populist rhetoric, or wave the flag profusely, but they propagate this notion that we’re the ones out of touch with ordinary people. Patriotism is now associated only with the Republican party, and it’s not common that flags are waved for any of our causes.
But there are efforts to try and change that. Last October, back when I served as Secretary for Muncie Resists, we sat through a workshop through Zoom to learn about what activists can do with Race Class Narrative. Sarah Vitale I know was probably the most amped about the idea, and I think I remember her talking about it when we first met several months prior. The idea of Race Class Narrative is to persuade voters by combining advocacy for both social and economic issues, and how even using words like “freedom” and “liberty” can be effective at this. It should be mentioned that the way that a “persuadable” voter is defined isn’t whether they are undecided or in a middle ground center (a.k.a the “lawnmower vote”), but people who will vote by their class interests.
Patriotism in the Park held by Muncie Resists.
Following this, Muncie Resists tested this out and held its own event almost two weeks ago called “Patriotism in the Park.” Local candidates were seen, mostly in the Democratic field, much like other events held by Muncie Resists and Indivisible, only in spirit of this time of year flags were placed all around. You could say that if a conservative were to walk by, it either tripped them up or made them second guess their understanding of political affiliations. Events like this would have to be tried several times to see if it can produce results, but this also raises some questions for us in progressive circles: Is this romanticizing the reality of American history? Could this just make us shift further into right-wing politics and limit what we can advocate for?
It’s not hard to find articles beating this issue to death, and on top of that it’s hard to differentiate between the potentially better optics for activism and watering down a lot of the messaging. And with so much being said already, I’m not even going to bother getting into the differences on this topic between electoral leftists and revolutionary leftists, who certainly see the issue in opposite ways. Instead, since the goal here is to reclaim patriotism then we should define what that entails. Is the idea that our dissent and/or efforts for the country to evolve are more American? Or worse, could it devolve into unchangeable trust in the system we live in?
Even if it hasn’t been flags being used as a strategy, preaching civility and trusting in our current system is already an overkill amount of faith in patriotism. On the same day that Roe V. Wade was overturned, House Democrats sang “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol right across from protesters of the Court’s decision. Not only was there a tragic juxtaposition, but a presentation of their fecklessness. All that this patriotic ritual did was remind us of how futile our elected officials are, along with the continual DNC emails that flooded everyone’s inbox that weekend and the fact that the party apparently couldn’t do anything despite a majority both in Congress and Senate at the time.
Though in actuality, part of why I might want to save my arms from waving a piece of cloth over Roe is because we’re past the point of optics with fighting the Supreme Court. They did after all just allow presidents to legally assassinate whomever they’d like, so I’ve already reached the point of believing we should abolish the court all together. Perhaps this is a more important question on a smaller scale, as a local election makes this more feasible. Here in Muncie, Brandon Garrett won his second term for city council last year, using bright American flags on his campaign door hangers. And when I interviewed Roger Overbey, running for an At-Large county seat this year, he too was all for waving the flag. But that wasn’t my only takeaway from my time talking to him. Because regardless of how he felt about guns, the progressive-wing of the party, or whatever he thought about me being trans, his main connection to the party was labor. That should always be a high priority for coalition building.
This is on the shorter side of a Post-Democrat article, because several headlines in the past week have made it impossible to wrap this up neatly, but here’s the final word: Reclaiming the American flag has the same line of reasoning as claiming conservative messaging (E.G Biden’s rhetoric on immigration, and the recent announcement of his lack of support for gender affirming care for trans youth.) However, wording does make a difference. If the word “security” attracts people to vote conservative, that can be used along with “social safety net” to mean economic security rather than restricting immigration. For that matter there’s no contradiction with words like “freedom” or “liberty,” though above all the party needs to support working class interests. Historian Gary Gerstle wrote extensively about how back when the New Deal was just starting and support was brewing, liberals in America changed their aims and rhetoric from the out of touch “character-building,” “good government,” “Americanization,” and “social hygiene” (most of which have some ill-willed connotation given the time period) to “security,” “opportunity,” and “industrial democracy.” To reach out to voters, let’s meet their material interests above all else.