It is strange that there is a Flag Day, which is today June 14th. It’s in the United States. I know of no other country in the (more or less) free world where such a day exists, although governments have many other ways of inspiring national pride and obedience.
A flag can represent a group or an abstract ideal. If it identifies a private group, such as an association or a company, it is harmless. It is different when he represents a public group to which certain members are forced to belong. Except for the leaders of the group and their favorites, the flag then represents a forced identity and some obligations of service. Examples of this were Nazi flags at official events or official flags in the Old South of the United States. An individualist would despise this kind of flag.
Flag Day was proclaimed by progressive Woodrow Wilson in 1916much like the Pledge of Allegiance was invented in 1892 by François Bellamy, a socialist who preached that Jesus was too. Schoolchildren have long been required to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance: American exceptionalism, at least in the Western world. A few decades after Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation, the Supreme Court happily ruled that the First Amendment prohibited American governments from imposing such professions of faith.
A flag attached to a territory, generally a national flag, can also symbolize an ideal. Many Americans view their flag this way. Woodrow Wilson believed that the stars and stripes represented “liberty and justice.” His conception of freedom of justice was obviously not shared by everyone, including the victims of eugenics, which was first legislated during his tenure as governor of New Jersey. The only way for an official flag to be truly representative of the entire population of a territory is to represent a common ideal, shared by everyone. A common ideal necessarily excludes victims of discrimination or public exploitation. From a classical libertarian or liberal point of view, a national or territorial flag can only be respectable if it symbolizes an ideal of equal liberty.
We should not expect people exploited or discriminated against by their government to timidly worship their government’s flag. But many do, which refers to what Bertrand de Jouvenel called “the mystery of civil obedience” (see his Under pressure). A number of hypotheses have been proposed to solve this mystery, from species habit (probably genetically programmed) to government propaganda and resistance as a collective action problem.
The ideal of equal freedom for all is not easy to achieve. In his Why am I not conservative too?, James Buchanan presents this ideal as hope and faith, even though we have known since Adam Smith that a self-regulated social order of equally free individuals is possible and conducive to general prosperity. One danger is nationalism, which most territorial flags try to fuel. At the other extreme, too much diversity can exclude the possibility of common values necessary to maintain a liberal society. For example, imagine two religious subgroups of individuals who worship god A and god B, respectively, and believe that their god wants them to kill infidels. The set of common values would be the null set, and equality of freedom would be impossible.
There exists in America and many Western countries a memory, or hope, of the ideal of individual freedom (and property), which alone can effectively prevent continued conflict between individuals and their beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles. . Finding a national or territorial flag that unambiguously conveys this ideal is not an easy quest.
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