The Flags of the Tribe

We’ve been writing a series of essays on the importance of symbols in political life, with a special focus on the flag as an avatar of the nation. It carries within it a series of meanings that unify and inspire the public to collective action. Flags are intended, we argued, to re-present the essential qualities of the thing to which they refer. The American flag re-presents both the 13 original colonies and the current number of states that make up the union. According to usa.gov, “Each of the colors on the flag has a meaning:

Red: valor and bravery
White: purity and innocence
Blue: vigilance, perseverance, and justice.”

I’ll take that on spec. It’s hard to deny the success of the red, white, and blue color scheme. It remains the case that Americans will, under certain circumstances, still “rally round the flag,” but much can be gleaned about the state of our current politics by controversies over other flags that populate our landscape. I was alerted to this some years ago when my daughter moved to Chicago and I walked around her neighborhood and saw not one American flag but dozens and dozens of rainbow flags, leading me to wonder what this might portend for our politics.

The issue was brought into relief recently in a controversy involving the wife of Justice Samuel Alito. The first incident occurred at the Alito vacation home in New Jersey, apparently as a decision by Alito’s wife Martha-Ann, who decided to fly an American flag upside down. According to an NPR story:

Sailors have historically used the upside-down flag as a symbol of distress. More recently, the upside-down American flag also became associated with the pro-Trump “stop the steal” movement and efforts to keep the former president in power. Some Trump supporters carried upside-down flags at the Jan. 6 riot. Because of that association, Democrats have called for Alito to recuse himself from cases related to Trump and the insurrection.

Subsequently, his wife flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at the vacation house, another dog-whistle to certain groups, but also a flag with a long and proud history in America, one that reflects a lot of the deeper political thinking during the days of American insurrection that led to the nation’s independence. As one scholar described it:

The story goes that in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, George Washington commissioned this flag to fly over the Massachusetts Navy, such as it was at the time. And the phrase across the top of the flag is an appeal to heaven, which comes from a treatise from the philosopher John Locke, who was an inspiration to many in the revolutionary generation. And the idea of an appeal to heaven is you make an appeal to unjust governments and to tyrants, and you make appeal after appeal after appeal. And at some point, you stop making those appeals because they haven't been heard. And instead, you make an appeal to heaven, by which Locke seems to mean you go to war and you let God sort it out. And so it's in some ways a synonym for trial by combat, right? Like, God will judge who is the righteous party through this battle.

Which goes to the point we’ve made earlier that flags, like all symbols, can have their meaning change over time. They are not static entities. A lot of the controversy over the flying of the Confederate Flag involves our understanding of the changing meaning of that symbol and whether those changes can empty a symbol of its representative meaning or its moral force.

The controversy surrounding Mary-Ann Alito, a Catholic, intensified when she was secretly recorded at a party saying that she wanted to fly “a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.”

The policy of this space is to not take, as far as possible, sides in the culture war debates of our time. In this instance we simply observe that in politics, as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If the government takes sides in contentious moral issues, we can expect the out-party to try desperately to wrestle control away from the in-party not for the purpose of re-leveling the playing field, but to tilt it in the opposite direction. Politics increasingly becomes a game of high-stakes moral brinksmanship.

We can see something about the intractable problem we’ve created for ourselves by observing that our symbols are tribal in nature and not “popular” in the sense they communicate a shared meaning and sense of allegiance. A nation that experiences membership in tribes as more important than citizenship in the nation, and the proliferation of tribal flags over national flags as a result, will be a nation already ripped asunder and whose politics will not only not heal those divisions but intensify them. The extensive use of pagan and neanderthal symbols in the January 6th riot indicates the depths of the new tribalism. That tribalism didn’t emerge from Zeus’ head, it is a reaction against a culturally dominant tribalism that has seized moral authority in the legitimate use of symbols which it relentlessly flies in the face of its opponents.

Time was a majority of American households had an American flag flying in front of their houses, or at least did so on national holidays such as Flag Day, the 4th of July, or Memorial Day. I didn’t see a single American flag displayed on my street on Flag Day, nor on other streets I drove up and down. This tracks with polling data we have that indicates that Americans are increasingly taking less pride in being American, and are also less likely to describe themselves as patriotic. Independent of whether we think this is good or bad, it makes cooperative self-governance an impossibility. For all our talk about inclusivity, tribes are inherently exclusive enterprises. “Inclusivity” typically refers to the desire of one tribe to infiltrate the institutions of power for the purpose of exercising social control.

To understand this state of affairs, we can hardly do better than turn once again to this site’s most reliable guide for understanding American Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville. Readers will recall that one of the central themes of his work is that in democratic societies, because everyone is made to be “alike and equal,” we come to feel more anonymous, more powerless, more helpless. We feel weak and insignificant amidst the mass of those, like us, indistinguishable parts of an impersonal whole. Having effaced the authority of the practices and institutions that bind us together, the linkages of family and peerage and place that mark an aristocratic age, contingent as they are, we now find ourselves casting about for new and different modes of connection.

In philosophy, when we ask what kind of thing a thing is, we look at what we call its “essential” properties and its “accidental” ones. Essential properties are the ones that the thing in question must possess in order to be that thing. An accidental property is one that the thing in question happens to have, but could still be that thing if it didn’t have that property. So, for example, having a soul, or being born of human beings, having a certain neuro-muscular-skeletal system are essential properties of being human. These are things other creatures don’t possess but all humans do. On the other hand, things such as sex, race, height, and so forth are accidental properties. We happen to have those characteristics, but we could not have those characteristics and still be human. I happen to be male, but if I were a female I’d still be human.

Tocqueville worried that we had lost our sense of the essential characteristics of humanness, and democracy made this problem worse through its technology of resemblance. We become little more than replaceable parts, and as we become less religious we become more likely to see ourselves in purely material, and thus disposable, terms. We are, at best, simply “bodies.” We no longer have an “essence”; we are simply an amalgamation of accidental properties.

Most humans find this state of things anxiety-producing. Our assessment of our condition doesn’t match our aspirations. We seek ways to buttress our sense that we matter by treating accidental characteristics as if they were essential ones. We then connect those accidental characteristics with those who possess the same characteristics, which allows us to distinguish ourselves from those who do not possess them. We become tribal. Tocqueville wrote:

In democracies, where citizens never differ much from one another and naturally find themselves so close that at each instant all can come to be intermingled in a common mass, a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are created, with the aid of which each seeks to set himself apart, our of fear of being carried away into the crowd despite himself.

It can never fail to be so: for one can change human institutions, but not man: whatever may be the general effort of a society to render citizens equal and alike, the particular pride of individuals will always seek to escape the [common] level and wish to form an inequality somewhere from which it profits.

Tocqueville’s analysis here helps us understand the fundamental incoherence of the Diversity, Equity [sic], and Inclusion (DEI) complex. But in some ways that only goes to the point in helping us realize that underneath the DEI impulse is the urge toward tribalism, and that urge satisfies the fundamental itch of democratic man who, in his loneliness and isolation, will latch on to the most immediately available accidental characteristic he can find, both to augment his sense of self but also to stave off the psychic desperation individualism brings in its wake. Tocqueville foresaw that American politics would likely devolve into tribal rivalries unless Americans could find ways to create a purposeful sense of unity.

Nationalism as we understand it today was not really in the cards. Tocqueville believed that democratic persons, isolated and lonely, would constantly strive for some kind of unity, and where the Church (the corpus mysticum) couldn’t provide it, some secular substitute would be required. But here’s the rub: our efforts at unity were often sterile and, what’s worse, destructive. For Tocqueville realized that in democratic ages we would substitute uniformity for unity, and an extensive complex of minute rules and regulations would cover our lives by treating us as if we were all alike, and thus making us more all alike. Furthermore, all our institutions and practices would direct themselves toward the goal of making sure that we resembled one another more and more; our schools, for example, would have uniformity as their unspoken goal. (“A Harvard grad is … just like every other Harvard grad. We guarantee it.”) Tocqueville again:

Men place the greatness of their idea of unity in the means, God in the ends; hence this idea of greatness, as men conceive it, leads us to infinite littleness. To compel all men to follow the same course towards the same object is a human conception; to introduce infinite variety of action, but so combined that all these acts lead in a thousand different ways to the accomplishment of one great design, is a divine conception.

The human idea of unity is almost always barren; the divine idea is infinitely fruitful. Men think they manifest their greatness by simplifying the means they use; but it is the purpose of God which is simple; his means are infinitely varied.

This digression helps us understand one of the most observable features of the day, largely ignored by the very same people who bemoan how divided we are, and that is the symbols we employ, wittingly or no, are tribal in nature. The formation of the Athenian polis in its glory days occurred when its leaders superseded tribal organization to bring people together in a polity, but part of the strategy for accomplishing that required a kind of purging of tribal symbols. If our governing structures adopt tribal symbols, our politics will be, at best, civil war by other means.

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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