The Anti-Democratic Urgency Behind the Alitos' Flag Fetish
The "liberal, anti-fascist consensus" of the post-WWII era was always tenuous, but the "rough beast" of Trumpism has turned one of our two major parties directly against it like never before.
You’ve probably seen the reporting about the liberal activist who posed as a conservative and captured Sam Alito waxing apocalyptic on her hidden microphone.
I won’t rehash the entire ordeal because it’s already been talked to death, but I think there’s value in putting it in broader historical perspective. This episode tells us something important about how the leadership class of the contemporary American right understands the current moment. It is a marker of how fully the multi-decade “conservative movement” that produced people like the Alitos or the Thomases has morphed into something far more extreme and unapologetically illiberal than what many of us ever imagined. This extremism and illiberalism were always in the “conservative” mix, but Trumpism has “turned them up to 11.”
Alito’s perception that “his side” is in a war with secularism, liberalism, and feminism, a war of no compromise in which “one side or the other is going to win,” is of a piece with the flags his wife is now famous for flying.
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Those flags convey a message of extreme distress and desperation. You fly these flags when you think unacceptable tyranny is at the doorstep. In the 2020s, that terrifying tyranny takes the form of a federal government led by Democrats and helmed by that notoriously radical, anti-American and anti-Christian ideologue…um, Joe Biden. Unless something dramatic is done to neutralize this imminent threat, we are on the brink of “losing our country” to degenerate, alien, un-American forces that are, AS WE SPEAK, pushing the nation toward a slippery slope that leads into a Godless, socialistic abyss from which escape will be impossible. Because THAT is the situation we currently face, because the usual mechanisms of political recourse have been exhausted (an odd thing for the wife of a Supreme Court justice to think, but whatevs), all options are on the table. All we can do is make an appeal to heaven and hope that God will forgive us should we have to do what our Patriot forefathers did in 1776 to get out of their moment of desperate, upside-down-flag distress…that is, physically attack some agents of the duly constituted government in the name of protecting our “God-given liberties.”
The extremism of that “Appeal to Heaven” flag is hard to perceive through the nostalgic, patriotic sheen with which it’s imbued by its association with the American Revolution. It must take a special kind of “radical left Marxist professor” like me to make the ludicrous claim that a flag flown by George Washington and the Patriots of the 1770s is somehow “un-American” or “illiberal.” I hope you’ll pardon a moment of early American historian1 pedantry while I explain.
The Appeal to Heaven (or Pine Tree) flag first appeared in 1775. It refers to this passage from John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689) where he engages the thorny question of when (if ever) violent revolution against the duly constituted government is justified.
Locke is saying "you need to try every possible earthly, non-violent mechanism at your disposal to try to remedy any grievances you might have with the standing government, but if you decide that's not working then you can always just start shooting (though I don't advise that because being tried for treason in this here 17th century is no fun) and hope, for the sake of your eternal soul, that God's on your side.”
The first usage of the Appeal to Heaven flag was by a group of New England hot heads in 1775 who were in the vanguard of the anti-British revolutionary movement. Flying that flag was the 18th century version of "Praise God and pass the ammunition." It meant "we're done talking, it's time for some shooting." For the real history nerds out there who want to read more about this revolutionary war context, Chapter 9 of T.H. Breen’s book American Insurgents American Patriots discusses “the appeal to heaven” idea in great detail.
That Lockean phrase "appeal to heaven" exists in a bit of tension with a more familiar Lockean phrase that appears in the Declaration of Independence..."a long train of abuses." That is, you shouldn’t start shooting over a few petty complaints...you need to make your case to "a candid world," assuming that they will only look favorably upon your cause if you’ve got an iron clad justification for it. By 1776 colonists had assembled a long list of grievances that appear at the end of the Declaration and comprise the bulk of its words. The point was, you don't do something drastic like, for example, storm the seat of government on the basis of cockamamie conspiracy theories cooked up by unhinged propagandists like Mike Lindell, Roger Stone, Sydney Powell, and Dinesh D’Souza.
So sure, violent revolution ("1776 baybee!!!" as Alex Jones would say) is part of our national heritage, but the idea that one of the most powerful and privileged people in the country is so oppressed by the administration of Joe Freaking Biden that it justifies grabbing her imaginary musket while Appealing to Heaven is utterly deranged. And if this is an opinion that SCOTUS judge Samuel shares with his flag-loving wife, then it’s frankly disqualifying. It's the sort of thing that only a brain-poisoned, red-pilled, terminally online right winger could think...which apparently is an apt description of at least one person in the Alito household. The Supreme Court’s entire job is to be a guardian of the Constitution, the compact that “We the People” created many years AFTER that social-contract-rupturing “appeal to heaven” moment of the Revolutionary War.
When a journalist from the Washington Post interviewed me for an article on the Appeal to Heaven flag, I went searching through my archive for references to it from before the early 2010s Tea Party era when it first got incorporated into the pantheon of “conservative”-coded flags (a la Gadsden). What I found was mostly crickets. The Appeal to Heaven flag was well known by the small community of flag nerds before the Tea Party, but it didn’t really have much political resonance for the vast majority of people. That said, the idea of a Lockean “appeal to heaven” WAS familiar to some pretty unsavory characters in the pre-Tea Party era, like Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and KKK leader Louis Beam, or the author of this 2006 piece in the Holocaust-denying “revisionist” magazine The Barnes Review. I also ran across this 1997 image from Walter Huss’s archive. It was in a blue binder in which he stored a printout of the entire run of this “internet gazette” written and published by a Missouri white nationalist and antisemite named Martin Lindstedt.
In 1995 the author of this text, Martin Lindstedt, wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper claiming that the Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag. Lindstedt is currently still active in far right circles and posts with some regularity on Stormfront.
Walter Huss was moved to download and print out the full run of the Modern Militiaman’s Internet Gazette in 1999, at the age of 81, by the same sense of fear and desperation that drove Martha-Anne Alito to fly those extremist flags. While I can’t say exactly how much of Huss’s worldview the Alitos’ share, I can say that their positions on guns, abortion, immigration, separation of church and state, LGBTQ issues, taxation, and the appropriate role (or lack thereof) of federal regulatory agencies line up quite closely. Huss’s positions on these issues all flowed from his apocalyptic sense that there was a vast, multi-tentacled, radical left (he would have called it Communist/Jewish) conspiracy to undermine the very foundations of America’s Christian civilization. This conspiracy had corrupted the nation’s news media, entertainment industry, educational system, and federal bureaucracy such that the nation was on the cusp of being taken over and thereby destroyed by the anti-Christian and anti-American left.
Antisemitism and the Genealogy of American anti-leftism
Such extreme rhetoric is plenty familiar to us these days coming out of the mouths of a wide array of MAGA maniacs from Alex Jones to Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino to Steve Bannon to Judge Jeanine to Tucker Carlson to [fill in the blanks]. It is, of course, ludicrous to think that being asked to use someone’s preferred pronouns, or to refrain from referring to your Black colleagues with the n-word, or to treat non-Christians with the same respect you’d treat anyone else, or to treat today’s immigrants with the same degree of respect you would have liked your own immigrant ancestors to be treated with, is somehow an immediate precursor to being put in a Satanic, Stalinist gulag.
But this apocalyptic “crazy talk” is not just talk. Even though some screaming heads in right wing media don’t actually believe it and are just rage farming grifters, many American right wingers (like the Alitos) really do believe this stuff. They inhabit what we might call a right wing imaginary in which the “war on Christmas” is real and ongoing, America’s decline began in 1962 when “they” took Christian prayer out of the schools, abortion providers are demonic monsters with an unquenchable thirst for the blood of innocents, the “LGBTQ agenda” is dead set on destroying “the family,” and the Communist one world gun grabbers in black helicopters almost certainly loom just over the horizon waiting for their moment to strike.
It’s this “right wing imaginary” that lends a sense of urgency to this brand of politics, that makes it seem as if a drastic “appeal to heaven” or a January 6 Hail Mary is an appropriate response to the horrors of a Biden administration that has cancelled some student debt, dramatically cut the nation’s carbon emissions, and has presided over an average inflation rate that is identical to the average inflation rate of Ronald Reagan’s administration. While many fascist organizers have been cold, calculating, dead-eyed strategists, the politics of fascism has almost always involved an extravagant, conspiracy-obsessed irrationalism that looks hyperbolic and even deranged to those outside of that imaginary, but feels very real to those inside of it. Politics is always about more than just culture, but these cultural dimensions create behavioral roadmaps and permission structures that can be quite consequential.
That “far right imaginary” and the media outlets that feed it have existed on the American right for many decades. It’s not simply a Trump era phenomenon. That said, both our media system and our party system historically had far more robust gatekeeping mechanisms that kept that wacky world more confined to the fringes of our national political conversation. The more normie “conservatives” who found themselves adjacent to and in coalition with these more far right elements developed all sorts of coping mechanisms to convince themselves that their fellow “conservatives” hadn’t gone completely off the deep end. The Never Trump conservatives have abandoned that vestigial coping mechanism and faced reality, but there are many others who are still whistling in the dark.
At that same event where Alito was caught on tape talking about the need “to return our country to a place of godliness,” for example, Justice Roberts refused to take the bait to call America a Christian Nation. "Yeah. I don't know that we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say, maybe not. And it's not our job to do that."
Justice Roberts is correct, but the problem is that his colleagues Alito and Thomas, as well as a significant portion of the Republican Party, disagrees with him. This is not just a matter of degree when it comes to church and state matters, this is a matter of kind, a matter of secular liberalism vs. theocratic illiberalism. My sense is that for much of the post WWII era, most Americans assumed that “conservatives” in positions of power and authority, with a few exceptions, were generally on the “liberal,” John Roberts side of that divide. Whether or not that assumption was well-founded in the past, it’s now incredibly naive. John Roberts may think he can keep the illiberal genie of Christian Nationalism bottled up, but I think he’s kidding himself. I wish he was as concerned about it and willing to push back against it as he should be.
The anti-democratic permission structure set up by a Trumpian, “far right imaginary” came a few lucky breaks away from seriously damaging if not destroying American democracy on January 6, 2021. That event was the culmination of a process of far right radicalization that slowly revealed itself over time. No one saw something like January 6 coming in 2017. Heck, most people were totally taken by surprise by it on the morning of January 6, 2021.
Three months into Trump’s presidency I wrote the thread below in a moment of shocked despondency over what recent events seemed to portend for the future of American democracy. I knew it seemed bad, but I didn’t yet have the language to articulate what I saw happening around me. If you’d told me then that many people (including myself) would be talking about Trump as a manifestation of an American variant of fascism, I would have scoffed at the hyperbole of such a claim and rejected the idea that the f-word had any place in American political discourse other than as a content-free epithet.
In hindsight, the only thing I would change is the word "we" to "I" in the third tweet. Obviously there had been many people in the past who perceived those cracks in that canonical story about American democracy. The "we" I was speaking for was the demographic of people who, like me, grew up comfortably (complacently?) inside the tenuous, anti-fascist consensus of the post WWII era.
That tenuous consensus (that I took to be far more solid than it actually was) consisted of propositions like: democracy is good, America is a land of immigrants, the US is a multi-racial democracy, the US is a secular nation that values religious pluralism, greater equality is a noble aspiration, people should be free to live the lives they want as long as they’re not harming others, the role of the government is to further the good of all & especially those born into less prosperous situations.
When I wrote that thread in 2017 I was still working on a research project about the history of nostalgia in 19th century America. I was still four years away from the moment when I stumbled upon the story of Walter Huss and decided that THIS was the history I needed to be researching and writing about.
I now realize that Huss’s story spoke to me in 2021 because it helped me see the long history of American right wing illiberalism (or “fascism”) that had led up to our present moment, but which had been almost entirely forgotten (or willfully memory holed). I mean, a white Christian Nationalist Holocaust denying fascist with ties to far right domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis got elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978 when I was ten years old! WTAF? And when I googled Huss in 2021 looking for any analysis or commentary on that stunning fact, what I encountered was mostly crickets, even from (most of) the politically-active Oregonians who’d lived through that episode.
What Huss’s story has revealed to me as I’ve slowly uncovered it is that a significant portion of my fellow Americans never agreed with that post-WWII anti-fascist consensus. They thought America belonged to Christians (and often only to their specific, preferred variety of Christian). They thought America belonged to white people, and that it was understandable why many white people were getting sick and tired of sharing that country with others. They thought any governmental policy that helped further the common good (and from which they did not benefit personally) was a tyrannical overreach that was surely a slippery slope to full Communism. They believed cultural changes they felt uncomfortable about must be part of some nefarious “cultural marxist” or “PC” conspiracy to steal the country from “normal” people like them and put it in the hands of evil-intended “degenerates.”
While it would not be accurate to call all such people “fascists,” these were the sorts of sentiments that a fascist movement could harness in its efforts to ride to power. And that ride to power, in the American context, would, as Walter Huss understood from the early 1960s on, have to happen through the capture of one of the nation’s two political parties.
Last I checked, there’s not a single Republican in a position of power or authority calling for their party to nominate someone other than the convicted felon and violent coup organizer who is the darling of the “Appeal to Heaven” crowd.
My graduate training was in early American history and that’s the era my first book was about.
Thank you for this--I think. It's about ruined my day, and I'm not even out of bed yet. But I'd been baffled by the Alitos and this explains a lot. I had a couple of "aha" moments reading it and it also helped clarify for me what has happened to my father.
You are a man on a mission since you discovered Huss and I am grateful to you for it. I have been saying that this was a long game the right has been playing and that the rest of us might as well have been dead asleep for all we saw of it. Your posts expose these things to the light and being a lamp in the dark is in my opinion a historian's (or a journalist's or other writer's) highest calling.
It’s quite obvious too!