(RNS) — It should be a contradiction that the Confederate flag was marched alongside the Betsy Ross flag through the streets near the U.S. Capitol on Independence Day.
The rebel banner was brought to the Capitol by hundreds of masked agents associated with Patriot Front, a white supremacist hate group founded after the 2017 showdown over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia. It waved in the wind alongside the flag of the 13 colonies and upside-down U.S. flags — a symbol of national distress — seeming to imply they were calling a nation in peril back to, or closer to, the exclusionary democratic vision of its founders. They echoed this in their chants to “reclaim America.”
But the hateful demonstration recalled a dissonance that has always been present in America’s politics.
Erin Wilson, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in response: “The white nationalist hate group, the Patriot Front, hid behind masks and marched the streets of Washington, D.C., ironically representing the opposite of patriotism.”
Many Americans fall prey to the temptation to agree with Wilson that overt racists marching Washington, D.C., streets on the nation’s birthday are “not us.” But these rebuttals are lazy at best.
One of the hardest parts about witnessing Patriot Front march the streets is knowing that they’re not entirely wrong. The United States was founded by racists and constructed through an unfathomable amount of racial violence, and its future continues to move forward on the tracks of racial discourse established by its founders. Just as they chanted in Charlottesville that they will not be replaced, and as they intruded upon the edited official story that officials would like to tell in the Capitol on America’s 250th birthday, Patriot Front stood in for all white supremacist groups saying they will not be erased from the story of how the U.S. became “great.”
If we’re honest about American history, we will have to admit that the current exclusionary politics the rebel flag represents are not a bug, but a feature of U.S. politics. The very Declaration of Independence — what Freedom 250 was celebrating — includes those exclusionary politics in the same document that contains our most cherished language about human rights and belonging. In it, Thomas Jefferson invokes the imago Dei (image of God), and then redlines it by invoking human hierarchy. He calls Indigenous peoples “merciless Indian Savages” — rhetoric that has always served as justification for racial violence. Exclusionary politics of the United States sits at the founding of this nation.
If we take that notion seriously, it illuminates how white supremacist groups frame themselves as patriots. They believe they are not viruses to the American project, but white blood cells. History gives them some reason to see themselves in that light. If the U.S. was founded as an unequal society, justified by the lie of human hierarchy, then it follows that when America extends the bounds of humanity, some fighting cells must be deployed to maintain homeostasis.
Historically, hate groups like Patriot Front have arisen to preserve that same boundary when freedom movements threaten to permanently expand who truly belongs here. The Ku Klux Klan, co-founded by Confederate veterans and clergy, arose to preserve the racial order or restore it after Emancipation and Reconstruction. At the time, Klan members were often local business owners and aided by police, showing how they were an accepted form of social control.
The fact that Patriot Front is allowed to march the streets and intimidate minorities by virtue of their presence, protected by the shield of free speech rights, while activists who criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement are locked up, is telling. The U.S. still accepts this kind of behavior as part of its DNA. On paper, white nationalism is called one of the U.S.’s greatest terror threats, but in practice is not treated that way, or else there would be some consequence for parading the banner of a failed insurgency against the Union and becoming a walking banner of harm to other U.S. citizens.
Oppressive regimes across the globe and throughout history have studied and even praised the U.S. as a model of systematic racial oppression. Nazi scholars studied Jim Crow, as did the Afrikaners of South Africa. And nations today are still taking notes on America’s exceptional way of transmuting xenophobia into policy, as seen in Colombia’s recent election, where a President Donald Trump fan and political doppelganger who promises to deport masses of immigrants was elected.
But what the selective agents of freedom throughout history forget is that, as my brother-in-law says, if you poison the well, everyone gets sick. Americans must realize that a threat to anyone’s freedoms is a threat to everyone’s freedoms. We are now living through an authoritarian power grab facilitated by antidemocratic currents that we have allowed to exist since the founding of the nation.
Perhaps a white nationalist group will never be welcomed with open arms into the Capitol on the Fourth of July; perhaps they’ll never be given the podium to speak plainly about the Great Replacement and to celebrate the fact that the U.S. continues in its systemic racism. But they can collect the winks and dog whistles in the president’s speech — when he shamelessly plugs the SAVE Act, which winks at the racist discourses that still dominate the U.S. social imagination, and gives support to racist policies like mass deportation and voter suppression. May we not forget that Nazi politics were not just unmoored racial animus but a political movement deeply concerned with borders and citizenship.
If Americans want to finally become the nation its founders claimed it was — a land with liberty and justice for all — it must do more than recite the mythology of the U.S. as a paragon of democracy, as Trump tried to do in the first third of his address to the public. We are not the world’s leader of democracy just because we say so. For as long as we parrot the ideals of human rights but practice the way of the brutal colonizers that founded this country, we will only be participating in the ancient practice of imperial ideology, which always finds some beautiful metanarrative as moral cover for obscene violence.
If we want the America we speak of to be the America we live in, then we will have to become more organized than groups like Patriot Front and other white supremacist forces. Their current authoritarian movement has thus far been able to mobilize a base using rhetoric that has stirred heirs to the Confederate spirit since Trump’s first run for president.
It’s time for the nation to see that this element of U.S. politics is its Achilles heel. Just as Jesus once said, a house divided against itself can’t stand, a nation that persecutes its own citizens, that attacks its own citizens’ rights, that abuses those who flee to it for a better life will never be stable.
