“Are you Mexican?” he asked.

“Nope, I’m Scots Irish,” I replied. “But Mexico is a great country. I’m doing a lot of work there these days.”

The councilmember’s question was not out of the blue. I had been flying the flag of Mexico outside my house for the past six months. He assumed it was some sort of statement.

In fact, I’m a serial and eccentric flier of flags on the $7 plastic flag stand that I’ve mounted next to the front door of my San Gabriel Valley home. I fly different flags for different reasons. In the process, I’ve learned how quickly people make inaccurate assumptions about flags and their meanings.

That’s why I’ve found myself feeling unexpected sympathy for U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, who has been in the news for the upside-down American flag flying at his Virginia residence, and a Christian nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag flying at his beach house.

Alito’s many critics say the flags demonstrate bias—an affinity with Trump supporters who deny the 2020 election results and support the January 6 insurrection—that violates judicial ethics. They believe he should recuse himself from Trump-related cases, or even resign his seat. Alito has said that his wife was the one who put up the flags, in response to a bitter dispute with neighbors who hate his guts.

For the record, I’m no fan of Alito. He has cruelly and unreasonably stripped rights from Americans, including rights to reproductive freedom and to protection from gun violence. He’s openly shown scorn and bad faith toward California. And his integrity is questionable, given his naked partisanship and the trips and favors he’s accepted from rich people, including the Eureka billionaire Rob Arkley.

In short, Alito’s scandalous, embarrassing presence on the Supreme Court makes me want to fly my own American flag upside down—traditionally a signal of dire distress for the nation. But I’m not sure the flags on his houses should be held against him.

Because I certainly wouldn’t want my flag choices held against me.

I don’t think my personal choices of flags are endorsements or mean that I can’t be impartial in my chosen profession, journalism. Still, I’m a citizen first and a reporter second. I retain the right to self-expression.

I own dozens of cheap flags (I refuse to pay more than $10 for any of them). Some are sports-related. I’ll throw up a Lakers or Dodgers flag when they’re winning or in the playoffs, since these two franchises unite my Los Angeles hometown like no other institutions. I like to put up a Green Bay Packers flag to please my wife, a Wisconsin native, and her family when they visit. I flew a Japanese flag for a couple of weeks to mourn when the parents of the brilliant shortstop on the youth baseball team I coached decided to move their son back home to Japan.

Mostly I fly the flags of countries with which I have no ties of heritage or culture. I’ve spent 16 years helping run an annual, traveling global democracy forum, and I often fly the flag of the country that will host us next.

I had Mexico’s flag up in advance of our 2023 Mexico City forum. Before that, I flew the Swiss flag for nearly three years (the 2020 Forum in Lucerne kept getting delayed by the pandemic). During that period, passersby and neighbors, not recognizing the red-with-white-cross emblem of Switzerland, often asked if I was a doctor or worked for the International Red Cross.

Last week, after the completion of our forum in Bucharest, I took down my Romanian flag, which had puzzled people for a year. “Did you get citizenship in some French colony?” asked one visiting friend, who noted that Romania’s flag is a dead-ringer for the French tri-color, just with yellow in place of white. The banner has now been replaced with the baby-blue-and-black of Botswana (the 2025 forum is scheduled for Gaborone). No one has recognized that one, except an unfriendly neighbor—feeling you, Sammy Alito—who may wish I’d move there.

I have a practical reason for flying these flags. My house is small. If I did early morning or late-night Zoom calls with forum hosts or funders on the other side of the world, I’d wake up my entire family. Instead, I do the calls outside on the front porch, with the flag of whomever I’m speaking with flapping behind me.

Sometimes my flags get personal, even political. I communicate my heritage by flying the flags of Ireland, Scotland, and Ulster, the Northern Ireland province from which my ancestors emigrated. When times are tough in California, I fly the Bear Flag to express my loyalty.

In recent years, I’ve also mounted the original flag of Hong Kong—where I lived as a child—and the green flag of Taiwanese independence as a protest against China’s threats and intrusions on both places.   But after my Taiwan flag got both praise and warnings about retaliations in my heavily Chinese American and Taiwanese American neighborhood, I took it down.

Flags can have dangerous power, especially when flown at public buildings. Just look at the pitched fights in cities about the Pride flag, or Confederate flags, or the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter flags. It is no coincidence that armies have long carried flags into battle.

But flags are also non-violent forms of expression that inspire conversations, like the ones I get to have. Neighborhood kids, sometimes even my own, ask me about the countries my flags represent. I tell them about Mexico’s democratic and educational progress, about Switzerland’s 500 years of peace, about Ireland’s surge to prosperity as part of the European Union, and about Romania’s recovery from communist dictatorship.

“Flags will not wave in a vacuum,” science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke observed in 1969. Clarke was talking about space and his hope that nationalism would end when humans traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But flags, even flags of nations, don’t have to represent division. Different flags, flown by different neighbors, symbolize pluralism—our commitment to let people have the loyalties and opinions they choose.

As Flag Day approaches in this polarized country, this eccentric flag lover urges you to leave space for all of us—even our nation’s worst judges—to fly whatever flags we wish, freely.

The post Don’t Draw Conclusions From the Flags Mrs. Alito and I Choose to Fly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A Court decision that relies on our federal constitution to legalize gay marriage across the country would be a triumph for individual liberty, common sense, and human decency. It would also amount to a well-deserved blow against that most persistent of villains throughout American history: the destructive creed of state rights and state sovereignty.

That same creed is at issue in the Obamacare case that is also expected to be decided this month, as the Court concludes its current term. At first glance, the Affordable Care Act and the institution of gay marriage don’t seem to have much in common as litigation subjects, but this case, too, is as much about the proper relationship between the states and the federal government as it is about anything else—which is true of so many of our political and legal fights these days.

King v. Burwell, the Obamacare decision, is a fluke of a case, an opportunity for opponents of the law to take another swing at the piñata (which they damaged, but did not break it in an earlier challenge) by capitalizing on some careless legislative drafting. The law allows the federal government to provide subsidies to lower-income insurance customers who sign up for coverage on the new exchanges “established by the state.” Trouble is, pursuant to other sections of the law, it was the federal government that ended up establishing an exchange for those states that refused to establish their own—and no one involved in drafting the law intended for its patients to be denied the same subsidies available to people signing up for coverage on a state-created exchange. Now, in their feverish desire to interfere with the relationship between American citizens and their national government, opponents of the law are hoping the Supreme Court will cut off millions of people from the support and coverage they are receiving.

As we await these landmark decisions that are so of the moment, it’s worth reading Joseph J. Ellis’s new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789. It’s a masterful reminder of how timeless this tension is between the concept of the United States as a singular nation and the United States as merely a confederation of sovereign states.

Ellis chronicles how four of our more visionary Founding Fathers—George Washington, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—recognized from the earliest days after independence that the individual states, and the excessive power retained by them under the loose Articles of Confederation, were a serious threat to the promise of the American Revolution.

Hence this influential “quartet” pushed for the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Washington’s greatness lay in the fact that, from his earliest days leading the Continental Army, he transcended his narrow identification with Virginia, to think more broadly in terms of an American nation. He came out of self-imposed retirement to lend his enormous credibility to the Philadelphia proceedings. Washington wrote at the time (in what can be read as a challenge to pro-confederation Virginians then, but also to Virginia Confederates who’d secede from the Union in the following century): “We are either a United people or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”

Ellis captures the rare brilliance and admirable foresight of Washington’s three intellectual partners in this quest—Jay, Hamilton, and the first president’s fellow Virginian, Madison. All three men had a clear vision of an America destined to be a unique power in the world, defined by its collective sense of purpose and its citizens’ liberty. They understood that to survive, and thrive, as a continental power, the United States needed a stronger national government representing, and protecting, all of its people.

Madison, often cited as the father of the Constitution, lost plenty of battles at Philadelphia, starting with his bedrock insistence that sovereign power be shifted entirely from the states to the central government. Madison gave up on what he initially considered his non-negotiable demand for a federal veto power over state laws, as he would later have to surrender on his proposal that some of the Bill of Rights also limit the power of states. Though the closest of political partners at other times, Madison and Jefferson disagreed vehemently over whether it was state governments or the new federal government that would be the biggest threat to individual liberty and rights, and history has proven Jefferson spectacularly wrong in that debate. It’s hard to blame him: Madison’s (and Hamilton’s) belief that the larger, more distant national government could be a more representative embodiment of “We the People” was a very modern concept.

But being so ahead of their time limited The Quartet’s contemporary success. They were able to remedy the immediate flaws of the Articles of Confederation, bind the new nation closer together and set it on the right course, but their new Constitution, by political necessity, was riddled with fraught compromises – such as the electoral college and the equal vote of each state in the Senate—whose underlying tensions would define much of American history.

Abraham Lincoln ratified and reinvigorated the Quartet’s accomplishment to the point where he deserves to join Ellis’ crew, and make it a Quintet. The Civil War and its aftermath—especially the 14th Amendment on which the gay marriage case should hinge—delivered on the Madisonian concept of a federal government empowered to protect citizens—especially minorities—from the bullying of local and state authorities (i.e., majorities). But that doesn’t mean the fight is over.

Nowadays we don’t often think about these federalist debates that have haunted our history, because we are too busy—and this goes for both conservatives and liberals—gaming the tension between Washington and state capitals. Even within the gay marriage legal fights over the last decade, both sides have taken turns, depending on the prevailing winds, arguing in favor of a state’s right to define marriage for itself, damned what the rest of the country thinks.

Too rarely do we ask ourselves the more fundamental question of whether we are citizens of California or Texas—or the United States? If the Quartet had invented a time machine and paid us a visit, they’d be astonished at the resilience of the state sovereignty creed, despite all we’ve been through as a nation. Too many Americans stubbornly cling to the belief that the United States is a confederation in which citizens’ fundamental rights—on issues like marriage, access to baseline health care, and what is taught in their public schools—can and should vary across state lines, to accommodate local biases.

Let’s hope in the coming days and weeks that five such Americans aren’t sitting on the Supreme Court.

The post What Do Gay Marriage and Obamacare Have in Common? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It seemed the Stars and Stripes were everywhere, enjoying an extraordinary status in American public culture and in Americans’ private lives. But even if some of the flags flying over car dealerships across the United States are impressively large—as is the number of U.S. politicians wearing flag pins on their lapels—Americans should resist the temptation to chalk up their love of the national symbol to some wonderful “only in America” exceptionalism.

People across Europe also have a passionate relationship with their flying colors, even if they are less conscious of it, and don’t normally fly the flag at fast food joints. Think back to the dramatic Mohammed cartoon controversy of 2006, when Danish flags joined American flags in flag-burning rallies across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting the prophet. Danes reacted with shock and sorrow because, they said, the national colors (depicting an off-center white cross on a red background) are to them a sacred and beloved object, a banner of joy and tolerance, of solidarity and community.

Newspaper accounts pointed out that in Denmark, the flag—affectionately called the Dannebrog or “Danish cloth” in ancient Danish—is everywhere. It flies on public buildings and churches to celebrate local and national holidays, including Denmark’s Flag Day—on June 15. It is hoisted over private homes to mark occasions like weddings and funerals, anniversaries and graduations, or just plain fine weather. It is printed on gift-wrapping paper. It decorates birthday cakes and Christmas trees.

Throughout Scandinavia, the flags of Norway, Sweden, and Finland are revered and domesticated broadly. They are considered people’s flags, not state’s flags. Their use is so pervasive that nobody notices it anymore, and those asked about it react with a “Do we really do that?” like the two young fish in David Foster Wallace’s parable who wonder, “What the hell is water?” Indeed, Scandinavians might even be tempted to think their flag fetishism is a sign of Nordic exceptionalism—at least until they try finding a post office in America.

And consider Great Britain. The venerable Union Jack has joined the nouveau riche Stars and Stripes in its association with unabashed merchandising. It seems that to Britons, much like to Americans, commercialism does not pollute the sanctity of the national symbol or one’s underlying patriotism. Branding the flag in unexpected, often crassly commercial setting and products, is instead deemed evidence of a more democratic, accessible, and friendly nationalism—one curated by people, not an aloof state.

Since the 1950s, the Union Jack has been enthusiastically stamped on goods and shopping venues, perhaps in celebration of the nation’s survival of so many trials to become a peaceful and affluent society. Later on, the Union Jack became the selling symbol of British cool, a design icon in posters, mugs, tourist souvenirs, record cover sleeves, cars, sneakers, garments—like the notorious Union Jack underwear.

In France, the national flag is venerated by the state and citoyens alike  as a powerful republican symbol, the product, like the American flag, of one of the great revolutions of the transatlantic world. Like the Stars and Stripes, and perhaps in competition with the Stars and Stripes, le drapeau tricolore is supposed to represent liberté, egalité, fraternité

The French and American flags share an often-overlooked commonality. Along with the red flag, a transnational banner of social protest before being adopted by a variety of socialist states, they belong to the minority of Western flags born republican and secular. There is no monarchical or imperial center to their design. And there are no religious symbols: in contrast to the Christian crosses on the Nordic flags, conceived centuries ago as crusading ensigns.

Of course, both French and American flags and their historical spin-offs (like the Italian tricolore) have been absorbed over time into national civic religions, despite their secular origins. In democratic, secular republics, the flag acquires an even greater, near-sacred, civic importance, if anything, in the absence of other public binding icons, like king or God.  Hence the need to pledge allegiance to the flag, and to develop rites around the proper use and treatment of the sacred cloth in public and private settings; hence the impassioned debates over flag-burning in the United States.

In Europe, the first flag days were established around the same time as the U.S. Flag Day, in the 1910s: usually in June, a time of traditional summer festivals. The latest have been created since the 1990s, in Russia, Romania and Poland, in Sweden (revived to become a bank holiday) and in my own country, Italy, on January 7. Globalization and immigration-related anxieties over national identities and, in former Communist countries, the desire to advertise new flags and new loyalties, seem to account for these late revivals.

And, of course, it feels like flag day anytime international soccer matches are played across Europe, and the flags come unfurled.

There is, of course, our shared continental flag, the flag of the European Union. This official emblem somewhat recalls the flag flown by George Washington’s Continental Army (a circle of 12 yellow stars on a blue background), and has its own day (May 9). But it attracts little passionate attachment—at least in the nations entitled to fly it. The EU flag seems to conjure up more excitement as an aspirational symbol, among those outside the Union seeking to join a community they associate with prosperity and democracy.

And that is all you can ask of your flying colors—that they be associated with a society’s shared accomplishments and values.  Even if it’s flying over a fast food joint.

The post You Americans Aren’t the Only People Obsessed with Your Flag appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.