To Exit Our Authoritarian Timeline, We Must Reclaim Patriotism by Keeping its Promise

The fireworks are over, but the America 250 pageantry runs through December. This summer, somewhere in the middle of the spectacle, my son and I talked about what exactly people were celebrating. I gave him the answer I believe to be true: This country made a promise—of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—big enough to be worth arguing about for 250 years. I also told him that, as I see it, our freedom and persistence to argue about it is itself not a problem, but part of the promise.

What I didn’t tell him is that weeks before the 250th birthday of the United States, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and that Republican statehouses across the South spent the summer of the semiquincentennial redrawing this country to limit the power of Black people.

In the mind of these broligarchs and their court intellectuals, the country would be better off run like a corporation, with a chief executive at the top and the rest of us spared the inconvenience of voting.

So, when he asks what we’re celebrating, the honest answer has two halves. We are celebrating something worth loving, at least in its aspiration and its potential; but we are also watching people who don’t really love it but say that they do try to take us backwards, to undo the progress won by generations of freedom-fighters.

This essay is about a mistake that our side—the freedom side—keeps making, while the side that only says they love freedom keeps stripping our freedoms. We keep handing them the flag.

Let me be precise about who “they” are. Peter Thiel, a billionaire and prominent funder of the authoritarian movement that is currently redrawing district lines across the country, has said in writing that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. His fellow travelers, Curtis Yarvin chief among them, have spent years building the case that self-government has simply run its course. In the mind of these broligarchs and their court intellectuals, the country would be better off run like a corporation, with a chief executive at the top and the rest of us spared the inconvenience of voting. This is not a fringe idea muttered at the margins. It is funded, it is staffed, and it now has friends in very high places.

It is no small irony that the movement and political project funded by people who have given up on democracy has embraced democracy’s symbols and iconography—and never more garishly than this year. They want the aesthetic trappings of democracy precisely because they intend to keep the trappings as a cover for abandoning its substance. They aim to foreclose the possibility of keeping our nation’s founding promise to the people.

While it may seem counterintuitive that those who want to gut democracy are able to appropriate its image, they have been successful at it for one reason: the symbols were sitting unguarded because too many on our side walked away from them. Our side did so for a number of reasons, including a general distaste for and skepticism of anything resembling nationalism. Broadly, invoking US values and using its iconography felt like a tacit endorsement of our nation’s long list of sins, a willful ignorance about the uglier details in the history of the nation’s soaring ideals.

Unfortunately, that understandable impulse meant ceding the founding language to the people least entitled to it. Today, we find ourselves in a symbolic landscape where the side who wants to strip our freedoms sports the US flag most prominently. Members of the side actively working to end birthright citizenship wear t-shirts with the text of the Constitution plastered on them. Without a shred of hesitation, they say I’m proud to be an American. They chant USA, USA, USA.

Our side has ceded the symbolic ground of patriotism.

If we looked at those as a binary choice—language or symbols—it’s clear why language won out. There’s no ambiguity about inalienable rights or equality under the law. The Founder’s language gave us both a rhetorical sword and shield to fight with. Conversely, protesters have literally been assailed with the US flag.

Reclaiming Patriotism

The good news is that the ground can be reclaimed. The multi-racial working class, which must be the foundation for any pro-democracy groundswell, has arrived at this very conclusion.

Earlier this year, Working Families Power and the Justice Research Fund fielded a nationally representative survey of working-class and middle-income households. We asked two questions about the same civic phrases: what should the United States stand for and what does it stand for today?

On the question of aspiration—what should the United States stand for?—this country is nearly unanimous. “We the People”: 82 percent. “Land of the Free”: 78. “Government of the People”: 76. “Equal Justice Under Law”: 75. Eighty percent of working-class Americans still say they are proud to be American. In an age when we agree on almost nothing, the emotional bond to the country is intact and it is shared across every line we’re told divides us.

But ask the second question—what does the United States stand for?—and the floor gives way. “Government of the People” falls from 76 to 36. Barely a third of Americans believe this country currently has a government of, by, and for the people. Every governance phrase we tested dropped 30 to 40 points on the trip from what people believe to what they see. Forty-eight percent say the American Dream is dead.

That’s a window to a solidarity-populist patriotism that believes in the promise and value of our country’s democracy and ideals, while calling out the elites who have rigged many systems and institutions against them.

This is the tension in which we live: people are proud and they know the government isn’t living up to its values or delivering for us. The identity bond holds; the performance bond is in pieces.

We don’t need to wave the flag harder, though we can’t afford to turn our noses up at it. We won’t win by saying things are fine, and that our institutions are working, because it is obviously not true and people won’t believe it. We can’t scold people for being frustrated with a government that too often serves the powerful and privileged instead of them. Every one of those moves asks people to choose between their sense of national pride and their “lying eyes—and they will pick their eyes.

We must reclaim it by meeting people where they already are. Yes, the ideals are noble, and worth loving. But the promise of US democracy isn’t being kept, and for many it never has been. That’s a window to a solidarity-populist patriotism that believes in the promise and value of our country’s democracy and ideals, while calling out the elites who have rigged many systems and institutions against them.

Delivering on the Promise of Freedom

But this can’t just be about rhetoric, or symbolism. The way to thread the needle here is to focus on delivering results. As they are proving right now in real time, the authoritarians cannot fake delivery of material benefits to the people. Their entire project is to make the government answer to the highest bidder instead of the people, so making the country work for ordinary people is the one patriotic act structurally unavailable to them. They cannot lower your electric bill or make health care more affordable or provide universal childcare because it runs against the central thesis of their political project, which is aimed at enriching the few at the expense of the many.

This means the truest form of patriotism available right now is unglamorous and local: building the leaders and the organizations that make government work again, in the places where people actually touch it.

This month, in direct response to Callais, the Working Families Party launched Southern Made, and the goal is deliberately specific: recruit one thousand pro-democracy, working-class candidates to run across ten Southern states by 2030. Parents, teachers, caregivers, service workers, faith leaders, and neighbors. Lead where you live.

Anti-democratic forces can do clever, ugly things with congressional district lines. They cannot redraw every school board, city council, and county commission in the American South. There are more of those seats than they have the capacity to rig, and a staggering number go uncontested every cycle for one reason: nobody asks anyone to run.

Southern Made’s 2030 target is phase one of a decade long plan. And it’s a plan that will cost: organizers on the ground in multiple states, candidate training, legal help with filing rules designed to confuse. It is deeply unglamorous and it compounds over years rather than quarters. It is also the only thing I know of that reliably turns a community into a governing force.

A school board member who shows up, answers the phone, and fixes the thing she promised to fix is not running a values campaign. She is the argument. She is one person closing the gap between 76 and 36, in one place, in a way no poll-tested message can simulate. She is proof to parents, voters, and taxpayers that the United States can be of, by, and for the people. That is how you take patriotism back. Not by claiming it. By earning it, in public, where the counterfeiters can’t follow.

The argument is more than theory. There are two Working Families Party candidates sitting on Philadelphia’s city council today, Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke—the first third party candidates to sit on that legislative body in a generation. Brooks and O’Rourke have gotten legislation passed that protected workers and renters during the pandemic and banned algorithmic rent pricing.

We handed away the flag because we were uncomfortable holding it because of the contradictions in our history. And we have underfunded the hard work of building popular governance that would bring the country closer to delivering on its promise. It’s the same error in two forms: treating patriotism as rhetoric to be managed instead of a promise to be kept.

Changing this requires a coalition that can do hard things and make ambitious leaps. This also means support that has decades-long commitments. Taking on hard things will require tolerance for hard fights, and sometimes losses.

A critical portion of this coalition is thinking differently about how we invest in organizations. So often, we go from project-to-project, or election to election. This boom and bust cycle keeps some of our best and brightest off balance. Wondering if the lights can be kept on and people can remain employed. Reclaiming our democracy is a year-long endeavor that doesn’t just hinge on election results. We need long term investments to plan for long term fights. I’m not suggesting that experimental ideas shouldn’t be funded, but we can’t over index them.

Think about a typical household budget. Rent and utilities are a constant and if we’re lucky, an annual vacation. Our organizations should operate much the same way. A community’s needs don’t often drastically change from year to year, but we may find ourselves in a posture of retrofitting our programming to match what funders believe is important.

I won’t paint too rosy a picture. The working class are split on important questions: 42 percent say it must ensure equal opportunity, 40 percent say it already does too much in the name of fairness. That’s a real disagreement, and our side hasn’t won it yet. But notice that the trust deficit isn’t like that. The gap between promise and delivery shows up in every segment, every region, on both sides of that 42–40 split. It is the closest thing to a shared American conviction we found. This means whoever can credibly show they are closing it holds the strongest position in American politics. Yet almost nobody is competing for it, because closing it means building something instead of simply saying something. Sixty-two percent of Americans tell Gallup the two major parties are doing such a poor job that we need a new one. The appetite is enormous and the infrastructure is thin.

Fannie Lou Hamer told us none of us are free until all of us are free. She wasn’t just offering a warm sentiment about solidarity. She was describing solidarity as a strategy to liberation.

I want to be able to tell my son that when people attacked our democracy while trying to steal its trappings, we didn’t cede an inch of it. We answered them the only way that actually works, by building the power needed to bring us closer to the nation’s unkept promise. I want to tell him that we created the conditions for a groundswell of civic participation and small-d democracy in states everyone had written off. And that work showed the people that the government could live up to its highest ideals.

That is the patriotism worth teaching him. It’s also the only version of this story where he inherits a democracy that’s his to be proud of.