The Flags We Fly

What made us decide Old Glory was not good enough for all of us?

At about 7 o’clock in the morning the sun hit it just right and it caught my eye, surprising me most by how taken aback I was to see it. Familiar yet unusual, it was an American flag angled off the porch of the house across the street from mine. It makes me nostalgic for a time before all this.

Twenty-four years ago, in the wake of terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, American flags just like it flew all over this neighborhood – and every neighborhood. Hardware stores in the early aughts hustled to re-stock the kits for the identical flags we hung to express our solidarity, not just with our government but with each other. Today, our solidarity tank is empty and it shows in the disparate flags we fly.

Some banners flown in my neighborhood today are explicit rejections of the sufficiency of Betsy Ross’s creation, political statements that grind sores in the name of seeing them. They demand attention to differentness, urging - or shaming - neighbors to embrace the niche argument they make. Their hoisters would argue they’re just awake to historical failings in and since 1776, but admit it or not, many revel in the endorphins of this cleavage.

This practice of mounting political battle ensigns on porches happens in neighborhoods that are the opposite of my prog-gy burg, too, with flags identifying past eras of American history, or emblazoned with the campaign logo of our triumphant President, many months post-election.

Only a little less defiantly, we fly flags of our university alma maters and affinities, a colorful variety of rival designs in transient suburbia. I confess that I flew an orange and white checkerboard flag for years. If you know, you know, and that’s the point.

There are also a few flags of pro sports teams on my dog-walking route, including one with a white “W” on a blue field, flown by a neighbor periodically signaling to fellow Second City expats each singular win by the historically hapless Chicago Cubs. Martyrdom is a vanity worth waving, even outside of politics.

In rural areas, one occasionally sees the flag of the Marine Corps – though rarely that of any other service branch, which makes separative sense, if you know any Marines.

How in just two decades did we go from using the flags we fly to denote our commitment to the common good to flaunting differences and denying common ground? What broke in us to nudge the exhibition of vulgar division on the intimate billboard of home?

There are no other affiliations we feel compelled to put on our porches aside from the tribes of our pride. My partiality toward Jif peanut butter and Ford trucks is strong, but I’d never put a flag of either of those on my house. Diet Coke drinkers, as a group, are smugly superior about their addiction to the stuff yet I’ve never seen one grey banner with a red swirl on a front porch.

One exhibit for the separatist impulse is the evolution of the “progress flag” – a name I only know because of Google. You see these banners on bungalow stoops in my suburb of Washington, D.C. To be sure, I live in a left-wing fortress, which our Democratic U.S. Senator, Tim Kaine, carried in 2024 with 82 percent. In fact, no Democratic candidate for Senate has done worse the 72 percent in my precinct in 20 years.

The flag I’m talking about has as its base the rainbow flag popularized in the gay rights marches of the late 1970s, with newer additions of pink-and-baby-blue triangles to tout transgender rights, plus black and brown chevrons demonstrating a commitment to racial identities. The odd thing about this flag is that the original metaphor of the rainbow indicated inclusion of all differences – but activists at some point deemed the metaphor insufficiently explicit and six colors too few. Even a flag designed to signal that Old Glory was too exclusive has now been deemed both too narrow and not narrow enough.

Those on the right who fly Gadsden flags re-popularized at Tea Party marches in 2009 and now emblazoned on vanity license plates in 11 states make the same sort of argument. It’s a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” banner with a menacing snake that dates to the Revolutionary War. As a right-winger, I get it, but those it offends think it screams for at least a symbolic rebellion against whatever compromises Old Glory might now encompass. Brainier conservatives, like Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, fly the Pine Tree Flag. It also dates to colonial times, with emblazoned lettering spelling out “An Appeal to Heaven,” harking back to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which enunciates justifications for the dissolutions of government. For these nerdy flyers, signaling fealty to the revolutionary founding logic that the Stars & Stripes conveys is not enough

The irony of all our separatist flag-flying is that we’ve never been as geographically polarized as we are right now. We’ve mostly clustered in neighborhoods with those of like mind or caved to the social pressure to conform. More Americans live in what political statisticians call “landslide precincts” now than ever before. With neighbors who almost all agree with us on the divisions of the day, our flags are not persuading anyone. They taunt the outliers among us and flash sleeve stripes to fellow warriors, but they’re not advancing our causes.

With America’s 250^th birthday approaching in 2026, we should ask ourselves if we want to wrap up this generation of our republic with pride in the intentional chopping of it. We’ve got one great flag that represents our right to disagree, one indicating the inherent equal dignity we defend in each other. We should prove that we can handle everything flying that flag means.