Democrats are reclaiming the flag. It’s about time

Opinion>Opinions - Campaign The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Democrats are reclaiming the flag. It’s about time Comments: by John Kenneth White, opinion contributor - 07/27/26 11:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied by John Kenneth White, opinion contributor - 07/27/26 11:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied

Karen Warren, Associated Press file Attendees are silhouetted in front of an American flag as they waited for California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to speak during a rally with Harris County Democrats at the IBEW local 716 union hall on Nov. 8, 2025, in Houston.

This past fourth of July, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) went before the television cameras to deliver an important address about patriotism.

Patriotism, Moore declared, means fighting for values and “the hope of a future even if we will never see it.” Using that standard, he argued that Americans must see the humanity and pain in one another and remember that “God’s grace is not only offered to the saint [but] to the sinner, too.”

In his speech, Moore drew a bright line between patriotism and President Trump’s nationalism. Nationalism, he said, “emboldens people to feel bigger than somebody else — to name the grievance, to find the target, to give people someone to blame.”

Fear is nationalism’s rocket fuel. Faith is what sustains patriotism.

Moore’s speech matters because the sentiments he expressed are being echoed by Democrats across the country. Trump has upended the American compact — namely, the civil religion of the country that affirms the principles of the Declaration of Independence and upholds the U.S. Constitution designed to implement them.

In 2005, Trump told the New York Times: “When they came up with the wonderful statement, all men are created equal, never has there been a more false statement.” Twenty years later Trump has ripped apart the Constitution’s elegant design of separating powers and abrogated them to himself.

The Democratic Party’s embrace of old-fashioned patriotism began in 2025. Two days before Flag Day (which happens to be Trump’s birthday), Reps. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) and Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) distributed American-made flags to their colleagues. The letter that accompanied their gift read, “The flag, and the values it stands for, belong to every single American.”

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg agrees: “Any salute to the flag, or patriotism, or talk of American greatness, is completely hollow if you do not respect the freedoms that the flag represents.” As Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) succinctly put it, it’s time for Democrats to “retake the flag.”

This is a big change. For decades, Republicans claimed the flag as their own, belting out Lee Greenwood’s song, “God Bless the USA,” and affixing flag pins to their lapels as a must-have accessory.

Democrats, meanwhile, were depicted as less-than-patriotic. Addressing the 1984 Republican Convention, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick declared that her fellow Democrats had morphed into the “San Francisco Democrats” whose values were alien to most Americans and whose instinctive response was to “blame America first.”

This depiction of the Democrats as the other was sharpened in 1988 when Vice President George H.W. Bush faced off against Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis (D).

During a famous focus group in Paramus, New Jersey, Bush pollster Robert Teeter invited two dozen undecided voters to talk about the two men. When the moderator asked, “If I told you that Dukakis vetoed a bill requiring schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance? Or that he was against the death penalty? Or that he gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers?” At this, one person exclaimed, “He’s a liberal!” Another said, “If those are his positions, I’d have a hard time supporting him.”

Historian Gary Willis said that running Bush “as the candidate of grievance” was “a brilliant stroke.” He said Bush denounced Dukakis with “affronts localized in a liberalism that is soft on crime and defense, exotic as a Harvard boutique, yet stealthy enough to win an election by misrepresenting itself to the American people.”

Today, that old Republican playbook has become shopworn in the age of Trump. A series of statewide battleground polls conducted by Siena College and the New York Times finds Democratic candidates leading on questions of who “has good character” and who “has the right kind of moral values.” Democrats are excoriating Trump’s unprecedented corruption and betrayal of his constitutional oath.

Moreover, Democrats are reclaiming the values of “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom” once enunciated by Ronald Reagan and making them their own — especially after civilian deaths at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in several U.S. cities.

In reclaiming the flag, Democrats are rejecting Trump’s blood and soil nationalism in favor of a patriotism rooted in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the adherence to the U.S. Constitution. Echoing John F. Kennedy’s 1960 slogan that it’s a “Time for Greatness,” Democrats are reclaiming the flag and, in Moore’s words, “taking ownership for what America can become.”

Shortly before assuming the presidency, Kennedy addressed the Massachusetts legislature. In his speech, Kennedy outlined several criteria for presidential success. One was making sure that “neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert [presidents] from the fulfillment of our sacred trust.”

Trump’s failure to come even remotely close to Kennedy’s idea of greatness has given the Democrats an opportunity to lift that standard for themselves. And in doing so, they are reclaiming the values of patriotism and love of country.

John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America who writes on Substack. His latest book, coauthored with Matthew R. Kerbel, is titled “Democracy on the Edge: The Trump Elections and the Future of American Politics.“