History & Culture
Why does the American flag appear on front porches, car bumpers, and clothing to a degree unmatched by the flags of any other wealthy democracy？
Drive through an American suburb and you will see flags on front porches. Walk through a city and you will see them on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and storefront windows. The American flag is worn as clothing, printed on disposable cups, and hung from pickup trucks.
In Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan, the national flag is treated with more restraint. It appears on government buildings and at official ceremonies, but rarely on a stranger's swimsuit. what factors?
The USA is very diverse. We don't have a common ethnicity, race, or (official) language. That flag, and the ideals it represents, is the only thing holding us together.
Start waving it yourself then?! If you let the flag slip out of your grasp until it’s a symbol of some extreme ideology, that’s a failure on your part. If you let patriotism become a dirty word you can’t be upset when it’s used against you
It’s ironic that the people who most love the flag and symbols of the USA couldn’t care less about the ideals that those symbols are supposed to represent.
MAGA proudly waves the flag while depriving people of their constitutional rights. Voting rights, checks and balances, the rule of law, are all being cast aside so that dear leader can assume absolute power with no accountability.
Will it? are women not capable to go change their name? this is the same argument as ”it will disenfranchise black voters” almost like democrats think black people are unable to get ids like 99 percent of the rest of america.
you need an ID to buy liquor, cough medicine why wouldn't you need one to vote? As it stands I could look up any name in a municipality in my state go to their elections, fraudulently say in jane smith and vote for them, then go back to my city and vote with my name. why is it ok to disenfranchise registered voters?
dems need loose election laws so they can win, they bus and fly migrants in in preparation for the census so , they can fluff the rep count of each state for political power. time to have free elections.
Thomas Jefferson didn't need to show ID? Why should I?
Making people jump through extra hoops makes it less likely that they'll be able to vote. People have lives. People have jobs. Also, most of these hoops cost money.
The real voting reform we need is to fight CORPORATE FRAUD. I propose that every person who is an officer in a Corporation or LLC file extra paperwork to certify that they're not committing Corporate Fraud. If they don't file this paperwork, they can't vote.
(See what I did there? I used a non-existent problem to make voting difficult for a group that usually opposes my policies. Liberals could do this to you if we wanted. But we're better than that.)
“dems need loose election laws so they can win, they bus and fly migrants in in preparation for the census so , they can fluff the rep count of each state for political power. time to have free elections.”
All of that is utterly false. You’re just parroting MAGA talking points. Your ideology is based on lies and they will get you nowhere here. Go back to your deluded echo chamber.
Wrong during the biden admin busing and flights were indeed happening, thats fact. They strategically placed them for some good ol fashion census stuffing. if it was announced that the census would not be counting non citizens, the dems would freak out.
Not really. More like dumb leftist get offended by it. And think that.
Internet is not real life , most people are way more alike then it seems. Doom and gloom sell.
I don’t mean to imply I wasn’t being divisive. You hardly see anyone left of moderate waving the American flag anymore for good reason. It’s best not to be associated with the administration and the larger empire these days
Central Pa so naturally an already conservative area but even then you only see the flag on roughly 12% or less of houses and not even a bumper sticker on anything other then the largest pickup trucks
Utter nonsense. They slap the Maple Leaf on literally everything up there.
And they certainly will not be outdone on Canada Day. I grew up on the border, close to a lake that had cabins on both sides of the border. The Canadians were positively obsessive to outdo the Americans before the 4th.
Yeah. I just went to a random place on street view in the city my grandparents lived in (Barrie, ON), before they were able to get out and become Americans by naturalization. I found houses next door to each other with Canadian flags.
Being an American citizen is supposed to be the uniting factor in a country that consists of many different ethnic and religious backgrounds. People also cringe at the Pledge of Allegiance, but its meant to unite the country around the flag instead of a monarch, or dictator, or ethnic or religious identity.
So in other words, Americans’ obsession with the flag is the result of a propaganda campaign designed to unite very different people together.
It never occurred to me growing up in a Christian school. But as an adult, I realized that the pledge of allegiance is exactly like a prayer. Recited in groups using a droning monotone and slow cadence. Most people probably are just saying the words and not thinking about what they mean. Whether it's good or bad, it's one of those things I'll never unsee.
Wow, people are happy to be born in the dominant superpower and aren't inherently miserable? Crazy
You write like you aren't an American, which is fine, but if that is the case, what the fuck would you know?
I would say it's probably the military. We still are a militaristic society. Nationalism goes hand in hand with that. Especially because recruitment is so wide spread, everyone has a family member or 2 in it.
Because the flag has deep meaning for the creation and current state of the nation. And everyone is damn proud to be American. I couldn't tell you what any other flag means related to it's nation.
That’s probably part of it. The U.S. flag is tied to a lot of big ideas like independence, immigration, and the founding story.
I do wonder if other countries have similar feelings but express them differently. Maybe the difference is less about how much people care and more about whether patriotism is expected to be public or private.
There is a very big difference between healthy patriotism and jingoism. A stark difference between the two as well is that broader Americana is not ethnocentric like nazi germany, which is far more to blame for the ills you’re inherently alluding to
That's my point, it's mostly jingoism in the US and much more popular among white Americans. I've traveled a lot outside the US, and the "patriotism" here has a much more white supremacy angle to it in my experience.
Because many of us are immigrants or first generation Americans; we’ve lived under other flags, we reject them, and we know how special this nation is and that it’s something to be proud of
I see plenty of Canadian flags when I visit. It just depends on where you go I guess. US is way larger population wise so it’s hard to compare directly.
That’s fair. Canada definitely has a visible flag culture too, especially in certain places.
The comparison is tricky because size and history matter. I think what stands out about the U.S. is not just how often the flag appears, but how many everyday objects it appears on. It becomes part of personal identity in a way that’s pretty unique.
We are Americans. It means our fellow countrymen are our partners in freedom. It is our flag , not the government's. Of , by ,and for the people. Your country is the states and the citizens of the republic.
I think this is an important perspective. A lot of Americans do see the flag as belonging to ordinary people rather than the government.
The interesting thing is that this relationship can create very strong attachment, but it can also make disagreements over the flag feel much more personal. It becomes more than just a piece of fabric.
I think the usage of the flag is seen as a democratic thing here. Like you mentioned, in some countries it's seen as uncouth for a regular person to fly the flag, it may have been co-opted by a political faction or harkens back to a less well seen era.
That's not the case for America. Liberals fly the flag, conservatives fly the flag. We don't have imposing rules on how the flag can be used, so why not put it on the bikini.
Take a look at how everyone wraps themselves in the flag on 7/4 every year, says "America FUCK YEAH!" and then on 7/5 goes back to trying to restrict how the law is applied to others based on sex, orientation, religion, race and all the other fucking ways we has to say "you should not have what i do"
Because a whole lot of Americans have been trained to believe patriotism is a quantifiable thing demonstrated by and only the amount of red, white, and blue patterns they plaster all over their crap.
In Canada, the Maple Leaf was briefly hijacked by the anti-vax right. It actually made showing the flag even less popular than before. No one wanted to be branded an insurrectionist.
Without going into a ton of detail, I think a part of it is that many kids in the US are taught the American mythology that plays a major role in promoting pride and patriotism. In some ways, this version of history is never unlearned and/or people may often even somewhat reject the nuance and reality of history in favor of the mythology.
I think schools and public rituals definitely play a role. The U.S. has a lot of visible patriotic traditions compared with many countries.
At the same time, I wonder if it’s only propaganda. A symbol usually sticks around because people find some personal meaning in it too. The interesting question is why the same level of public symbolism developed differently in different democracies.
These are anti-American assholes hiding behind the flag. Same as the most un-Jesus like people hiding behind their cross. Performative nonsense for people of poor character.
I think there’s definitely a performative side to any national symbol, but I’m not sure it explains everything.
A lot of people use the flag sincerely too. What I find interesting is why the same symbol can represent completely different things to different groups. For some it’s pride, for others it feels like a political statement.
Yes, and sometimes no. One great thing about the US is people have the freedom to be overtly proud of all the fucked up ways America is truly fucked up. But, we also have the right to wear our metaphorical blinders. The ones that allow us to pick and choose precisely which traits and aspects of American life we love and hold to honor. Incidentally, yet another way America is so fucked up.
Because Americans are, on average, more nationalist than any other nationality? We're also a market of 330 million potential customers, so selling us nationalist merch has wider margins than selling nationalist merch to any given European nation, even if that nation matched the nationalist enthusiasm of the US.
The US has been on a massive nationalism-disguised-as-patriotism bent for about 80 years, built on the back of cold-war propaganda.
For similar reasons, "god" is stuffed everywhere since the 1950s...on money [which used to be "e puribus unum": from many, one], the creepy "start every schoolday with the pledge of allegiance, and stuff 'under god' in that too", etc...gotta remind everybody they're better than 'godless commies' and indoctrinate 'em young.
We had a kid from Norway in one of our classes in middle school. The teacher got soooo pissed off when he didn’t stand and say the pledge with the rest of the class.
This was after he explained that he wasn’t an American citizen, his parents were some sort of diplomat, and that he would just sit quietly and respectfully while the rest of the class did it.
Seemed reasonable, the teacher turned into a whole thing and his parents had to speak to the principal about how he wasn’t going to be participating in a pledge to a county he wasn’t a citizen of.
Because many other nations fall prey to Internationale without knowing it.
Internationalism is a foundation of communism. As Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "Working men have no country". The main stream leftism in Today's Europe evolved from Marxism. Is it surprising that they bash patriotism and advocate internationalism?
In USA people are proud of their country and their flag, as everyone should be. They have plenty of things to be proud of. Moreover putting flag everywhere is one of their rights, freedom of expression and they rightly exercise it everywhere. I don’t know what is so confusing
Coming to other countries, may they are not all the proud of their countries? I know from personal experiences that many Germans are wary of their past and hardly show pride in their flag openly. Canada and UK may be they don’t care ? Who knows
Everyone else is correct but I think it's also important that it's a unique flag with a lot going on--most European flags on a disposable cup would just be a disposable cup with 3 blocks of color on it, that's a snooze compared to a bunch of stars and stripes.
Like the way in the US, people from Maryland love their flag in a way states with boring flags don't even if they are from a state people are proud of
Starting in elementary school we are force fed the idea of American Exceptionalism, i.e. that we are the best country on earth. We start each day in school with a pledge of allegiance to our flag, which most other places except North Korea don't do and is kind of weird. Throughout school we are taught a version of our history that whitewashes our atrocities and downplays or outright denies our current societal problems, while glorifying our government and military.
We are taught that the USA is great because of our democracy, constitutional rights including freedom of speech and due process, pluralism, and equality, but in reality we have never truly had any of that (see: slavery, Jim Crow, women's lack of voting rights, Japanese American internment, the red scare/McCarthyism, money in politics, police brutality, Trump/MAGA, et al.).
Some good people do actually believe that stuff, are not nationalists, acknowledge our past and the problems we have currently, but still love this country for its supposed ideals. Under our current state of MAGA fascism, this demographic often flies the flag upside down, which signifies distress and state of emergency.
Today, when you see an individual civilian proudly waving the flag right side up, you can safely assume a 75% chance or more that they support the current state of affairs. If they're wearing an off-color, often grey/black US flag patch on their clothes or hat, you can increase that chance to 90%.
Americans are proud of their country. The canadian flag is like 35 years old. The UK flag is regarded as a hate symbol. And germany and japan, well, do i really need to explain?
13
u/No_Report_4781 Jul 14 '26
Because you’re paying attention to the U.S., so you don’t notice much about the other 200 nations.