Aw, horse chester. What high-horse blowhardism. The right-wing extreme certainly does not support these premises, for all their applauding the iconifying of them, or their characterizing themselves as loyal patriots, honorable mutineers taking back The Ship Of State from a rogue Admiralty. In fact, their behavior is quite the opposite.
What do those words we children were taught to chant actually say?
A pledge is more than just a promise, it is an irreversable act of submission, as in formal marriage or joining a brotherhood of bikers. To “pledge allegiance” means to take one as your liege, that is your King, and so to faithfully serve – not to judge, not to obstruct or bring down, but to give fealty, obedience. “The Flag” is obviously not literal, but what it stands for does not mean a body of particular ideas you choose to agree with or not like an armchair barrister, it means the seat of authority. Especially in a Republic, that means the ones elected call the shots, and you obey whether you voted for him or not, whether he orders you to fight or to farm, and whether he wears your color hat or not. You do not follow command on ship, or refuse to, because of how you feel about the Admiral, or where he orders the ship to sail, but because his authority is what is represented by his Flag, and that you have pledged to serve. Personally, having been both a hippie and a Marine, I prefer a more libertine than authoritarian status quo, but that is what the words mean.
Next it says, “The United States Of America.” That means the “one nation indivisible” and not one particular State, or one particular Party. That national organization, that body of definitions and agreements, is the Republic for which the Flag stands, the legal corporate national entity which exists as defined by the Constitution and the Laws. It is that which we loosely refer to as “the government” or “Washington” including the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Treasury, all the other agencies and bureaus, the lands and properties it owns, its accounts and assets, its population of citizens, and the Presidency, which is the seat of the Flag. You pledge allegiance to that Flag of that Republic as an existing thing if you pledge in reality, and not to some fantasy ideal you would imagine to be better, or to some faction within it you presume to define it apart from all the rest of us.
“Under God” would seem universally redundant, if we presume all of the created universe is under whatever we mean by God. The obvious error of the Christian right or any religious group lies in presuming that means God as defined by their establishment of religion, and the government should therefore in some way be subject to the dogma, doctrine, scripture, or influence of persons of power in that religion, that is, “loyalty to the higher authority” of their own interpretation and enforcement of God’s Law. It is what the First Amendment was written to prevent, and what the Dominionists of the evangelical Christian faction of the hard right are deliberately and quite openly doing.
As for “liberty” it is abundantly clear the Social Conservatives of the right wing would define that to be liberty for all to walk freely within the lines they draw, and liberty for them to draw those lines where they will, in accordance with morality as they define it. Those who object they declare to be seeking not liberty to choose, but license to sin. For its connotations of promiscuity, the word liberal itself has become an unexamined label of wrongness among the rightniks, with a terrible dark stereotype presumed to all upon whom they stick it, like nigger or commie. What’s wrong with liberals? Duuuh, Pelosi!
Across the political spectrum from right to left, and from authoritarian to libertarian, good people all sincerely wish for “justice for all” but every one of us can easily point to injustice somewhere in that system of agreements to which we pledge our allegiance, and within which we all no doubt sincerely hope to accomplish some good. To suggest that right wing extremists somehow have the edge on any of these things is unfortunately benighted. As easily as they say others are not “real Christians” the right-wing extremists are able to say others are not “real Americans” – and somehow they believe only themselves are either of those, and therefore only themselves qualified to make the decisions and laws of a Christian America, and by God, they will defend that with their 2nd Amendment rights.
I am not saying I support fundamentalist obedience to elected leaders, or there should not be an active confrontational dialectic in the democratic process, but only pointing out that supporting the decisions of the elected officials of our government, whether that’s how you’d have it done or not, is what Allegiance to the Flag literally means. It is what those words mean that the right-wing extremists are most objecting to under this administration, and most openly refusing to actually do, for all their touted oaths of allegiance, patriotism, and duty.
Americans who do not knowingly and wholeheartedly support the agenda of their blatantly sectarian coup de etad are advised to be prudently wary before voting for one of them, no matter whom they oppose, or how they wave Old Glory.
James Nathan Post
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