Why should a liberal waive the Stars and Stripes?

 As long as I remember and wherever I lived, I have always had an American flag proudly hanging in front of my house on Memorial Day.  What? Me, a professed liberal?  So divided are we as a nation, that we assume that anyone who shows their colors must be a right-wing, hyper-patriot who considers themselves the only true patriots; their country right or wrong.  Yes,  it is for the country and its form of government, the republic for which the flag stands,  to which I pledge allegiance, but I do not swear allegiance to the individual occupying a high office. I reserve my Constitutionally given right to support or to criticize and object, especially if I fear those leaders are undermining the very reasons for which our country was founded.

 I am of the silent generation, a child during  World War II,  shaped by the Cold War,  a student in Berlin before the Wall, married to a refugee from a Communist country ruled by a dictator (Yugoslavia), and I remember once upon a time when all saluted the flag. That was before Viet Nam when many were disillusioned with lies and miscalculations of those who were in the White House. It became unfashionable for many who considered themselves ideologically to the left to display our flag. Patriotism was not the solely owned symbol of a certain ideology before Viet Nam and it should not be now. What I am saluting by raising my flag are those who died to keep our democracy free, an uncle after whom I am named, who fought for America in three wars and lies in Ft. Hood's cemetery and for others like him.

 Being a first-hand witness of the alternatives to American democracy, my concept of freedom is about those freedoms protected in our Constitution and a government established by those who did not want us to be governed ever again by a king, an autocrat, or a dictator.  We are a  country with a bill of rights amended to the Constitution and a structure of government to give those who did want ever again to be governed by a king a method and a voice to keep any wannabe autocrat checked, balanced, and subject to the same rule of law as those governed.

It was not by accident my college major was political science. I have been actively engaged in politics my whole adult life, and I have never been silent. Civics to me was not a boring subject; it affected my life in concrete ways, as it still does.  It is not by accident I write from a viewpoint that honors and respects what commentators and scientists call a liberal democracy because of its protections of civil rights and free speech that permit the people to have a say in its governance.  It is also not by accident that I treasure and exercise the right of a journalist who may differ with the president to be published in media, free of retaliation and retribution from an imperial executive who calls the press "the enemy of the people".  It is not by accident that I object to a president who summons and benefits from an adversary of our country to help him win an election and then ignores, denies, and lies about it as he admires and embraces the foreign policy of that same foreign power. We did not fight World War II and the Cold War to become some other country's satellite.  So I am showing the colors today because I am a liberal, not in spite of it.

Footnote: My uncle was Col. Felix Halstead, US Army, who fought in the Spanish American War, First World War, and World War II.  Felicia is the feminine form of Felix

https://definitions.uslegal.com/l/liberal-democracy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy