Graphic designers can relax. Trump’s “movement” doesn’t need to go in search of an official banner to waive at Trump events, because it already exists and it’s already getting waved.
For a brief moment, after a white supremacist carried out a massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., it seemed as though the Confederate battle flag, that most divisive of symbols, might soon be on its way out of the American political arena.
But now that explosive and complicated vestige of the Old South is back, in a new — and, to some Americans, newly disturbing — context. During President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign, followers drawn to his rallies occasionally displayed the flag and other Confederate iconography.
Where just a few years ago this symbol of white supremacy was relegated to the back of rusty pickups and organizations insisting there is a “historical context” behind monuments to traitors, Trump’s embrace of the “alt right” has expanded the stars and bars natural range.
Since the election, his supporters and others have displayed the flag as a kind of rejoinder to anti-Trump protesters in places such as Durango, Colo.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Hampton, Va.; Fort Worth; and Traverse City, Mich.
The distorted, rectangular version of the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia never appeared as either the banner of the Confederate States or its forces in the field. It has always had another purpose—it’s simply been the persistent and dominant symbol of white nationalism since the time of reconstruction. Which makes it perfectly appropriate to represent Trump.
On Election Day in Silverton, Ore., the flag appeared at a high school Trump rally, where students reportedly told Hispanic classmates, “Pack your bags, you’re leaving tomorrow.” The day after, at Kenyon College in Ohio, the college’s president, Sean M. Decatur, spoke to a worried campus, describing his discomfort at seeing Confederate flags on display in the nearby city of Mount Vernon.
The elimination of this symbol from public spaces was slow, but it represented a steady march of decency. That march has gone into reverse, and a symbol that only months ago was regarded as unacceptable is making a deplorable comeback. One of those greasing the rails for that comeback is Trump’s new White House strategist, Steve Bannon.
Shortly after the June 17, 2015, Charleston massacre, an article posted on Breitbart argued that the Confederacy was “a patriotic and idealistic cause,” and that its flag “proclaims a glorious heritage.”
Patriotic traitors. Glorious racism.
Robert E. Lee never managed to hang a Confederate banner on the White House, but don’t be surprised if one of these retro-symbols of hate gets planted there. Perhaps by Bannon. Perhaps by the proud new Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III.