Yes, I’m Also Conflicted About America at 250. I’m Flying the Flag Anyway.

As the nation turns 250, patriotism has been weaponized by the right and vilified by the left. I'm taking it back.

Photo by Justin Cron on Unsplash

There’s an American flag on my wall now.

I bought it and hung it myself, in my apartment in Brooklyn, which is not a sentence I would have predicted writing, and the strange part isn’t that I did it. It’s that I thought about it as much as I did. Not agonized, exactly. But a flag used to be a thing you just put up. This one I turned over for a while first. And I don’t think I’m unusual in that.

This Friday, the country celebrates its 250th, and we are about to be inundated with what sadly feels like a forced celebration that has split predictably into two camps that agree on almost nothing except their certainty. One treats the day as a loyalty test that one passes with unbroken pride. The other treats it as a crime scene you’re obligated to mourn at. Already, there's a wave of coverage gloating over the poor turnout of “America’s State Fair” on the National Mall as if it's a giant L for the White House, not realizing that it speaks poorly of all of us.

Somewhere between those poles is just about everyone I actually know, people who love this country and are worried sick about it in the same breath, and who can’t find a tent at the party with room for both feelings at once. That middle is not a small place. The polling, as we’ll get to, says it’s most of us. It has just gotten remarkably quiet.

I grew up with the flag. We flew one every Fourth of July, first in Hutchinson and then in Overland Park, Kansas, and there was nothing complicated about it. We were a politically engaged household, intensely so, but it was a kinder and gentler version of the thing than what we’ve got now.

My dad was a Naval officer and a Rockefeller Republican. My mom is a Democrat who attended Jimmy Carter’s inauguration and held a local office. They disagreed about plenty, but the disagreements sat on top of a much larger pile of things they agreed on, and watching the two of them was most of how I came to see the world. The flag flying atop our front-yard flagpole didn’t belong to either of their parties. It belonged to the house.

So when I tell you that hanging one on my own wall two years ago took more consideration than it should have, understand that the consideration itself is the thing I want to write about. Some part of me had started running the math on what the flag would say about me before I’d even gotten it on its hooks. Whose side did it put me on? What was I endorsing? Whether a visitor would read it as a position rather than a fact about where I’m from.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that loving your country shouldn’t require anyone else’s permission.

It sounds obvious when written down. It did not feel obvious standing there with a hammer, and the distance between those two things is the whole story.

I know I’m not the only one doing this. I heard a version of my own second-guessing on the radio this past weekend, when the scholar Eddie Glaude was on NPR’s On the Media talking about the 250th and mentioned a young reporter who’d asked him whether hanging a flag this summer would mark her as a Trump supporter. Whether the thing now came with a politics already attached, like a bumper sticker she hadn’t chosen. That’s the low hum I’m talking about. Rarely said out loud, never at the cookout, but there. A real uncertainty about whether you’re still allowed to love the country in plain sight, or whether somewhere along the line the loving of it got handed to one team.

For the record, I’m a center-left guy. I think this administration is doing real and lasting damage, and I’ve written plenty about it. I also think there's a pernicious streak in all-or-nothing progressives who'd rather signal virtue than get anything done. None of that has cooled the part of me that wants to put a flag out and grill something and watch the fireworks without filing a brief first.

If that sounds like a contradiction, it’s one I’ve been living comfortably my whole adult life. I’ve never been good at choosing tribes. I was a proud member of Phi Delta Theta at KU in Reagan’s America, which turned out to be perfect group therapy to deal with my father’s untimely death Labor Day weekend freshman year, even if grief counseling wasn’t really a thing we knew about at the time. I still very much identify as that Phi Delt.

I also spent formative college summers as a counselor at Hidden Valley, a Free to Be You and Me-inspired arts camp in Maine, where I helped run the ropes course, learned the Neil Young catalog on guitar, and earnestly led trust falls, group problem-solving, and campfire sings for kids from intellectual East Coast families. It was a world away from Kansas, and it pried open my worldview, leaving me more curious than before. I still think about it fondly. I still very much identify as that camp counselor.

I loved both places equally, and neither one ever canceled the other out. Looking back, that refusal to choose probably shaped me more than anything else I could name. It’s also exactly why I bristle at being told to pick between loving my country and being honest about it.

Which brings me back to those two partisan camps, and the thing they have in common. Both have decided that the middle isn’t on the menu.

Turn on Fox News in the coming days, and you’ll get one script. America is great, full stop, and your job on the Fourth is to be grateful. Any hesitation, any mention of what’s broken, reads as a failure of nerve, proof you’ve gone soft on the country. Patriotism means certainty. Doubt belongs to the other side.

Turn the other way, and you'll get the mirror image. The country is mostly a record of its sins, and your job on the Fourth is distance. Celebrate too freely, and you're a sucker, looking away from the damage to democracy. Here, patriotism is the thing you qualify before you're allowed to feel it. Pride belongs to the other side.

Two scripts, and both want the identical thing from you: a settled feeling before the first firework is lit. Pick your certainty. Pledge or protest. Greatest nation on earth! or so-called democracy. What neither one has any use for is the person standing in the driveway who happens to feel a few of those things at the same time.

I want to be careful here, because the two camps are not morally identical, and I won’t pretend they are. The people treating the day as a crime scene usually have the better, fact-based reasoning. The damage to democracy is real. The authoritarian trends are as real as the president’s name going up—then coming back down—on the Kennedy Center. And for plenty of Americans, the country’s promise has been a check that bounced more often than it’s cleared. Their anger isn’t a pose. It’s earned, and a lot of it is the kind of anger that built every good thing this country ever talked itself into.

So my quarrel was never with the anger. It’s with where the anger goes. There’s a version that stays and demands the country be what it said it would be, and a version that walks out the door and calls the leaving a kind of honesty. One of those changes things. The other just leaves the flag on the lawn for someone worse to pick up.

Here’s the thing that gets me, and it comes from Fox’s own polling, which is not where I expected to find the heart of this column. Fox News went looking in June for a patriotism crisis and found something stranger. Big majorities in every party still call themselves patriotic, around nine in ten Republicans, but also six in ten Democrats. And across the board, more people called themselves patriotic than said they were proud of the country right now. Sit with that. The patriotism is still there. It’s the easy pride that’s gotten harder to say out loud, and the gap between the two is where a lot of us seem to be living.

Fox News didn’t run with that, of course. They led with the flag-display gap, 64 percent of Republicans against 27 percent of Democrats. But the truer number is the one underneath. Most of us, left and right, still feel the pull. We’ve just misplaced the language to say so without it sounding like an endorsement of something we never signed up for.

I got the clearest version of this from my oldest son, Nate. Two years ago, heading into his senior year of college, he told me how many of his peers wouldn’t celebrate the Fourth at all, wouldn’t stand for the anthem, because they couldn’t find a way to pull for a country whose record they’d been taught in full. I understand how that happens. It’s plain as day, actually. They were handed the original sins and the complicated history and the genuinely terrible chapters, taught all of it honestly, and somewhere in the teaching, the good got quietly filed under “assumed” and the rest under “the truth.” I don’t have to love that this is where it landed. I also don’t need to blame the kids it landed on. It is what it is, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What got me was that Nate wasn’t reporting this with any satisfaction. He was lamenting it. He told me he hated that patriotism and the flag had become shorthand for populism and nationalism and MAGA, and that he wished the left hadn’t simply handed all of it over without a fight. My kid, in other words, had arrived on his own at the exact thing that was keeping me up at night. He wanted the flag back, too. (Proud dad gonna proud dad.)

I keep turning that conversation over. A twenty-one-year-old shouldn’t have to construct a special permission structure to feel something about the country he was born into, and the fact that his whole cohort seems to need one is the clearest sign I know that we have let something get away from us. Not the love. The right to say it plainly. And the strange part is that the permission they’re looking for has been sitting in the founding document the entire time, in the most quietly radical sentence the founders ever wrote.

Not “a perfect Union.” Not “a Union, eventually made perfect.” A more perfect Union. Read it slowly. It’s an admission. The men who wrote it were telling you, in the opening breath of the document, that the thing they were building was unfinished and would stay that way. They baked the incompleteness in on purpose. They didn’t promise a finished country. They demanded iteration. They promised a direction.

That phrase is the whole answer to both scripts. You can’t fail a more perfect union, because it was never a test, and it doesn’t hand out grades. It points down a road and assumes you’ll spend forever walking it. The crowd insisting America is already perfect and the crowd insisting it’s already lost are making the same mistake from opposite ends of the dial. They both think the country is a verdict. It’s a verb.

And the verb has always moved in both directions at once. The same document that wrote down equality counted some of us as fractions, and then took a war and three amendments and a century of people willing to be beaten bloody to make the words mean what they say. That isn’t the system failing. That’s the system, working the slow and grinding only way it knows how.

Frederick Douglass understood this better than anyone who has ever celebrated, or refused to celebrate, this holiday. On the fifth of July in 1852, he stood up and delivered the angriest Fourth of July speech this country has ever heard, told a white audience that the day was theirs and not his, that the same sunlight bringing them life had brought him stripes and death. And it was not a renunciation. He wasn’t walking out on America. He was holding it to its own paperwork. His charge was never that the country was illegitimate. It was that the country was being false to itself. Those are different accusations, and the whole thing lives in the difference. One walks away. The other stays and fights.

That’s the distinction I keep circling as the fireworks get closer. Cynicism walks away from the country and calls it clear-eyed. Nationalism wraps itself in the flag and calls every criticism a betrayal. And then there’s the older and harder thing, the one Douglass was doing, and the abolitionists, and the suffragists, and the marchers, which is to love the country enough to stay inside the argument with it, to want it better and say so out loud and refuse to leave. That’s patriotism, and it never had anything to do with believing America has always been good. It’s believing America is worth arguing with.

I should probably say what it is I love, since it isn’t the fairy-tale version. I’ve never thought America was uniquely virtuous, or somehow exempt from history.

I love that this country has always been loud enough to contain people who think one another are completely wrong and still insist on calling themselves Americans. That isn't a bug in our operating system. It's the feature.

What I love is the argument.

I love that this place is loud and large enough to hold a Rockefeller Republican and a Carter Democrat under one roof, Frederick Douglass and the men he was indicting, my son and everyone he’s questioning, and still somehow call itself one country, that is far from perfect, but is building towards a more perfect union. I love that we insist the promise applies to people it was never originally written to include. The opportunities aren’t equal. The outcomes are nowhere close. But the experiment is still alive, still contested, still capable of surprising itself. That’s worth loving. It’s worth staying in the fight for.

My conversation with Nate is most of why there’s a flag on my wall now. But if I’m honest about what finally moved me from agreeing with him to actually buying the thing, it wasn’t an argument. It was a race.

At the Paris Olympics in 2024, I watched the U.S. women’s 4x400 relay run the final event of the track meet, and they didn’t just win, they erased the field, more than four seconds clear, a tenth of a second off a world record that had stood since 1988. Four American women, all of them women of color, took the baton around that track with a strength and a joy and a total absence of apology that knocked something loose in me. I dare you to watch it and not feel joyful emotion and American pride.

It was the purest jolt of patriotism I’d felt in a decade, and I’ve spent a while since trying to name why. The closest I can get is this. I was watching the more perfect union actually unfold before my eyes in glorious dominance. Not the finished thing, the forming of it at full speed. People the Founders never imagined, and in many cases never intended, carrying the country’s colors and outrunning the world while wearing them. That isn’t a country that betrayed its promise. That’s a country a few laps further down the road, its own first sentence pointed at. I bought the flag that day.

It’s still up. And here’s what’s changed since I hung it: I don’t think about it anymore. I love the way it looks on my wall and walk past it the way I walked past the one in our yard in Kansas, without doing the math, without checking whose side it puts me on. Not because Trump got better (he hasn’t.) Not because the people on television stopped fighting over who owns it (they still do.) Because the thing I figured out standing there with the hammer finally sank all the way in. Loving the place was never anyone else’s to approve, and all that considering was the only part of this I ever had any say over.

So this Friday I’ll go to a friend's backyard grill, have one too many beers, and watch Brooklyn kids of all ethnicities and national origins wave flags already bent in half, and feel proud of this country and worried about it in the very same breath, and apologize for neither. Nobody ever told the framers their union was finished. They told us to keep forming it. Two hundred and fifty years in, the work is the same as it ever was, and so is the only honest way to love the place: with your eyes open and your sleeves rolled up.

That flag on my wall doesn’t belong to Trump, and it doesn’t belong to the people protesting him. Same as the one in my parents’ yard never belonged to either of their parties.

It belongs to the house.

Maybe that’s all I’ve been trying to get back.