I Hated July 4th. This Is What Changed My Mind.

I allowed my brain to interpret every sign of America as something just left of a lynch mob dancing on my lawn.

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The eruption of fireworks made me want to crawl out of my skin. I fully believed that the night of July 4, 2017 was a celebration of white supremacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would participate in a festival of hatred. The power was also conveniently out in my apartment for the entirety of the evening, which made the jarring pyrotechnics all the more inescapable and amplified—as garish as a performance of sirens and headlights in my living room, unrepentant in their hours-long parade. Red, white and blue—over and over again. 

The people on the outside celebrated a country that was not only founded on slavery, but used the 13th amendment to preserve it. A country that also maintained the lynching of black men like Michael Brown and Philando Castile through the shield of law enforcement. And even though it elected its first black president, it slipped on the familiar when it elected Trump as its leader—a President who had no qualms with using xenophobic dog-whistles to rally his base. 

And these were just the visible warts on the face of the nation. What about the abscesses that oozed beneath its stripy, starred garb? The invisible system of racial discrimination and microaggressive harm? The walls built into every industry to keep the marginalized away from the American Dream? The emotional labor required by black women like myself to educate anyone on all the above? 

From my 2017 perspective, those who celebrated the 4th of July reveled in the murder of the innocent, and clapped in the defense of the assailant. Anyone who waved a flag, might as well brandish a whip. Anyone who took the day off to corral friends and family around a grill and under an umbrella of explosives or worse—under the presidency of Trump—might have as well donned a swastika pin and raised an arm into the sparkly skyline. 

This was my lens for a good number of years, and one that I look back on with grief. Why did I let a holiday wreck me so well? In hindsight, I have a few theories as to why, and it boils down to a worldview I unintentionally adopted—one that only lent to the fragility of the observer.

For the race-essentialist, the 4th of July is a semiotic nightmare. Oftentimes, interpersonal gestures and words take the spotlight when discussing microaggressions, but in the emoji-age, we ought to consider the role symbolism plays in drilling in groupthink, deteriorating meaning and expanding the modern idea of harm. What made the celebration of American independence an abyss of grief for me was the meaning I placed on every sign that marked the day.   

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure defined a sign as any motion, gesture, event, or pattern that conveys meaning. The green light at a traffic stop means 'go', and blue on a faucet indicates 'cold' water. Meaning has been given to these shapes to form signs, and through repetitive use and education of the meaning behind the signs, we can add it to our symbolic lexicon. 

After two-dozen revisions, our current Star-Spangled Banner is meant to represent the nation of the United States of America. But how did it go from a mere symbol of a nation, to a symbol conveying conspired hate—at least in the minds of a radicalized few, my former self included?

I'd suggest it has something to do with concept creep—a term Jacob L. Mackey referred to during a previous conversation I had with him on microaggressions. Concept creep, coined by Nick Haslam, and popularized by The Coddling of the American Mind, refers to the ever-expanding meaning of harm-related language, such as trauma, or even the word 'harm' itself. In my case, harm came to include the symbol of the American flag. And in a reciprocal sense, the flag didn't just represent a nation, the concept behind it crept to represent a bad nation. Sure, one can look at a flag and think critically about the flaws of its country's government or systems. In my case, however, I felt like I was under attack at the sight of it. So what energized that progression of meaning—what taught me to reinterpret the meaning behind a symbol to the point of physical distress?

I'd like to nominate the mainstream media narrative for that progression of definition. Everything from social media to sports told me exactly what kind of meaning I should ascribe to the American flag, and its companions. One of fear, not fondness.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, followed by the catastrophe-confirming appointment of Trump, the media streets in the mid twenty-tens were saturated with posts on police brutality, the national anthem and white America. This came with a flood of symbols to aid the viewers' dissection of events. Images of symbols such as the MAGA hat, The Thin Blue Line flag, the Trump posters, and The BLM fist—to name a few—often accompanied stories detailing the brewing cultural tension. 

Law Enforcement and the Thin Blue Line flag existed in opposition to the BLM movement. So if one was only familiar with the pro-BLM argument, and was as disheartened with grief as I was to hear any opposing cases, the meaning assigned to the Thin Blue Line flag no longer communicated the courage and bravery of law enforcement, but rather that the bearer of that symbol sided with police officers who murder innocent, unarmed black men. 

If you supported athletes' choice to stand during the singing of the national anthem, rather than kneeling in protest, in over-simplified reasoning, you supported the killing of black men. The further this meaning-to-symbol relationship was exacerbated through fear-mongering media—especially social media, where news travels best when laced with negativity—the further the meaning ascribed to certain symbols waxed sour.

Therefore, the progression of meaning in my mind, energized by the media, devolved this way: 

1. Wearing or waving the American flag is associated with patriotism. 
2. If you're patriotic, you're most likely a conservative. 
3. Only conservatives oppose BLM. 
4. Opposing BLM means that you support the killing of black people. 
5. Therefore, waving the American flag means you support the killing of black people.  

We also see this same re-education of benign signs into something indicative of harm in the recent lawsuit filed against Penn State at Abington, where the boss of plaintiff Zack K. DePiero, Liliana Naydan, allegedly told writing faculty that “white supremacy exists in language itself, and therefore, that the English language itself is ‘racist’ and, furthermore, that white supremacy exists in the teaching of writing of English, and therefore writing teachers are themselves racist white supremacists…”

Now imagine that it's not just the American flag that warrants this ungracious interpretation of meaning, but other icons of American culture: an eagle, American football, a pair of cowboy boots. For those steeped in critical social justice ideology, interfacing with these objects (and I'll speak for my former self) is aggravating on an average day. But seeing these concept-crept-visual-ideas all in one weekend, over and over again, paired with loud explosives and laughter, distorts the character of loved ones opting to celebrate the 4th of July, and as a black individual, lends to a sense of distrust because once more, bearing the American flag with pride means you support the killing of black people—with pride.

All of this—the concept creep, the concentration of offensive symbolism, the narrative—contributed to a sense of catastrophization on the 4th. Catastrophization is a cognitive distortion that leads you to assume the worst case scenario out of a relatively generic circumstance. In my case, I was brought to tears under a burden of anxiety because I allowed my brain to interpret every sign of America, including a date dedicated to the celebration of its independence, as something just left of a lynch mob dancing on my lawn.

If you aren't familiar with how I broke the grip of cultish indoctrination as a whole, forgiveness played a key role in setting me free. But my attitude shift towards the 4th of July began amid the insanity of 2020. 

I was hit with the sting of cognitive dissonance after COVID-minded public health officials failed to call George Floyd protesters back indoors. The protesters were instead given the green light to do what we had been warned against repeatedly out of love for others. I couldn't quite tell—did these people who declared support for BLM, actually care about black lives?   

They allowed good people to go outside and do the thing we had been warned would kill us all. That transcends inconsiderate. The people that were supposed to be the 'good guys' were no better than Derek Chauvin. And that forced me to think more critically about who the 'good guys' were, and what exactly caring for the marginalized really looks like.

I started to question what was in it for them to maintain such dangerously contradictory positions. Somehow, somewhere, someone was lying. But why lie? Why distort the compassion of well-meaning individuals? This line of questioning led me to the obvious-–money and power.

Around this time, I turned to a refreshing pair of news anchors, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, who at the time had a segment on The Hill's YouTube channel called Rising, and I was impressed by their similarly aligned remarks concerning the contradiction of stay-at-home orders—especially since Krystal and Saagar's observations were from both the right and left—and felt some peace and validation in questioning the powers that be. 

I questioned the fear that fueled media, and the censorship machine that went to work to squash varied opinions on COVID and quarantine measures. I questioned the power that tech corporations had to minimize voices at will. I questioned every one from Don Lemon to Patrisse Cullors, to the celebrity cohort that marched in lockstep with the 'right' idea. I had always questioned Donald Trump, but I allowed myself to question Joe Biden—why was a white old guy all of a sudden the arbiter of blackness? 

I questioned so much that I began to question questions—specifically why people were paying dearly for merely voicing them? That led me to revisit a little American idea called Free Speech—once a textual sign for intolerant rednecks, and now, my last hope towards freedom from a form of slavery that I had no idea was slowly choking out my mental health.  

I realized that it was this freedom to think, to express new paths of reasoning, to outwardly question those in authority, to protest injustice, or to express oneself uniquely, that many Americans remembered and honored when they beheld the symbol of the flag.  

Over many months, I meditated on the reality that the United States is ultimately structured to protect the smallest minority—the individual. There is something to be said about how even the collective identity of blackness turns on its own once certain questions threaten sacred cows like the Black Lives Matter movement or the status of oppression. Anywhere that groupthink can be formed, totalitarianism has a chance to consume the participants of said group. 

Being told what to think by conforming to group ideals made me a slave to fear, and allowing myself to reorganize how I thought set me—the individual—free. Learning how to think has afforded me the freedom to reinterpret symbols with more grace. It's also placed the control to assign meaning to symbols, signs, gestures and words back into my own hands. I don't need to depend on cash-hungry newscasters to tell me who to love or hate. And I won't leave it to billion-dollar corporations to manipulate me into surrendering my ability to reason—they won't get me to roll-over on command. This freedom to question popular ideas, re-evaluate their truth and efficacy, and communicate my findings without jail time—as I am doing now—is partly why those annoying fireworks pop-off as fiercely as they do. 

For those who have grown up here in the United States in struggle, I'm not diminishing your experience by declaring my old beliefs completely moot. The economic disparity grieves me. The American Dream slowly fading away from my generation and the one to come, frightens me. Wrongful sentencing in this country's brutal penal system breaks my heart. The glaring disparities that rip through various demographic lines infuriate me. No, rather, my new position is founded on the reality that without American ideals—voting rights, freedom of speech, checks and balances—those issues will be so much harder to address, let alone fix. (Trust me, I'm ethnically Ugandan) 

While the United States has a lot to work on, given its checkered past, maintaining the freedom to progress towards a better future, or preserve what has worked for us in the past, is worth celebrating. This year I celebrate freedom from the lens that was my own imprisonment.

I came of age in the 1980s and 1990s in a Democratic Party and a social milieu that was unabashedly patriotic. To be sure, political liberals back then could be critical of America’s past and present, but most saw our country as an imperfect nation aspiring toward but often falling short in living up to its own high ideals. The dominant zeitgeist of the political right was dangerously nativist and insufficiently self-reflective.  

President Bill Clinton, on whose campaign I worked in 1992, famously pronounced at his first inaugural speech, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Young liberals in those days were animated by a form of American exceptionalism that elevated the idea of pluralism. In my twenties I wore a T-shirt broadcasting the American motto e pluribus unum—”out of many, one.” This was liberal patriotism. 

Yet this center-left, glass-half-full narrative of our national experiment has increasingly yielded to a withering appraisal of American life, one that is rapidly becoming a self-fulling prophecy.

Today’s liberals rarely express patriotic sentiment in public, abandoning their civic voice to a far left that holds America in contempt, which in turn generates a politics that is both defeatist in tone and alienating to ordinary Americans. A nation that thinks less of itself will become less of itself. Mainstream liberals badly need to rediscover their patriotic spirit.  

When beloved actress Betty White died at the age of 99, my wife began rewatching old episodes of The Golden Girls, a mid-1980s sitcom about four aging women who lived together and experienced the highs and lows of their golden years. In one episode, the strong-willed Dorothy lectured her Italian-born mother, Sophia, on the meaning of America. 

“When I was a little girl,” Dorothy stated, “you told me how much it meant to you when you came here to America for the first time. Do you remember what you thought of when you first saw the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch of freedom? … Ma, you taught me to love this country. … You were the first one who put an American flag in my hand.” 

I was instantly struck at how quaint this monologue was in today’s cultural context, especially coming from a show that was on the vanguard of such social issues as gay rights and sexual harassment. Sadly, this kind of flagrant patriotic sentiment would be considered cringe in today’s liberal circles. 

A 2023 Gallup poll found that national pride on the left has precipitously declined in the past two decades. In 2003, 65 percent of Americans identifying as Democrats felt “extreme pride” in their country; by 2023 it was 29 percent. Only 18 percent of those aged 18 to 34 indicated that they were “extremely” patriotic, a steep decline from 85 percent in 2013. “Party identification remains the greatest demographic differentiator in expressions of national pride,” stated Gallup, “and Republicans have been consistently more likely than Democrats and independents to express pride in being American.” 

On a recent drive in West Virginia, I noticed American flags outside many homes — even on those in economically depressed coal-mining towns, where people could be forgiven for feeling their country had abandoned them. When we returned to our neighborhood in North Potomac, Md., an economically thriving, politically blue area, I counted one American flag in four blocks, unsurprisingly mounted on the doorway of an Eastern European refugee who fled a repressive Soviet republic.  

So inured had I become to the lack of patriotic sentiment in my neck of the woods that I found it positively inspiring in May of this year when fraternity brothers at UNC Chapel Hill rehoisted the American flag on the campus quad after radical activists had replaced Old Glory with a Palestinian flag. The young men locked arms and refused to budge as protestors reportedly hurled bottles, rocks and insults. 

Why have liberals become less patriotic?  

Some blame an American public that elected Donald Trump and social factors such as persistent economic inequality. Others cite social media echo chambers that extol, for example, a letter from Osama Bin Laden justifying terrorism against the U.S. Others point to the rise of an oppressed-oppressor ideology that sees America as pervasively racist. Indeed, when universities adopt policies that deem such comments as “America is the land of opportunity” and “Everyone can succeed in this society” as “microaggressions,” it should surprise no one that many students adopt negative attitudes toward their own country. 

A few Democrats understand that a politics of self-loathing will never win the day. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, both Democrats elected in 2022, successfully ran on liberal policy agendas that emphasized freedom and American exceptionalism. President Biden himself may still represent the old flag-waving sensibility, but the larger progressive political class that accompanied him to power exudes little passion and, judging by the president’s recent demoralizing speech at Morehouse College, has brought the president down with them. 

Come November, we shouldn’t be surprised if many ordinary citizens opt for churlish nativism over a politics devoid of love of country. Liberals desperately need to get it back. 

David Bernstein is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and author of “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.”