Jeff Sharlet has posted an incisive thread about the Blue Lives Matter flag that has moved from anti-Black Lives Matter symbol to a common staple at Donald Trump rallies. I’ve been increasingly unsettled by this sinister rendition of Old Glory as it crept from the fringes to centrality in the president’s re-election campaign, and have found it clarifying to hear an expert on the American right offer his take on what this flag has come to signify. I’ve generally been thinking of it as a fascist inversion of the American flag, but Sharlet offers a more nuanced take; noting its increasing dominance within Trumpism, he argues that it represents something he calls "police nationalism,” an “identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing”:
Police nationalists are white supremacists (including occasional non-white ones; it's an infectious disease) who don't want to think of themselves as such. The police nationalist flag now means many things: anti-Black Lives Matter (which is how it began), Trump, &, yes, a martyred memory of officers killed in line of duty. It's like Trump: it twists [. . .] Police nationalists now call their flag "Back the Blue"--a statement they experience not as non-partisan but as transcending partisanship. It's an assertion of ultimate authority. But worse implicit in the slogan "Back the Blue" when used by police nationalists is the fantasy of a coming conflict (which aligns neatly with QAnon's idea of a "storm") in which "backing the Blue" will mean choosing a side in a civil war not so much feared as anticipated.
[. . .] Police, for all the profound & fundamental problems w/ American policing, often do good things. One can recognize that & still see police *nationalism* for what it is: The replacement of civil authority w/ armed power.
Sharlet’s points about how the flag and the beliefs behind it are meant to transcend partisanship in the name of an “assertion of ultimate authority” are particularly illuminating. By putting the idea of the thin blue line front and center - the notion that society would descend into chaos were it not for the order maintained by the police — police nationalists (to run with Sharlet’s term) promote an idea of American society that supersedes our common, unifying ideas of democracy, government by the people, separation of powers, peaceful co-existence, and constitutionality. In its place, they re-imagine America as a land ever on the knife’s edge between order and chaos. This two-dimensional conception of the United States sees force as the arbiter of American life, rather than the rule of law or the peaceful conflict of democratic competition; as Sharlet puts it, it’s “the replacement of civil authority w/ armed power.” Given the rise of the “Back the Blue” flag in the wake of BLM protests, it’s difficult to avoid reading the thin blue line not as a divide between chaos and order, but as the line between equality for all Americans on one side, and the continued brutalization of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement in the name of a white supremacist social order on the other.
It is remarkable to me that the Trump campaign, and so many on the right, have abandoned wholesale the actual American flag which they fetishized even a short while ago: football players were considered traitors if they kneeled before it; school kids were considered communists if they did not say the pledge to it; demonstrators deserved imprisonment and worse if they dared to burn it. The replacement of the American flag with this washed-out facsimile —as if white-supremacist vampires had battened on and sucked the color and life out of it — has happened so swiftly as to create the distinct impression that they were never actually as loyal to the actual flag as they pretended to be. Symbolically, it is immensely telling that they have essentially given up the American flag — the flag of all the people, of democracy and freedom — to their opponents in the center and left of the political spectrum, in favor of a flag that represents not all of America but its law-and-order, racist rump. To re-configure the America flag into a symbol of exclusion and raw power is to create a parody of American values so repugnant that by comparison, even setting fire to Old Glory as an act of protest now feels tame. It is as if they have given up on America itself.