The WaPo editors lamely suggest that Kamala Harris "try to persuade skeptics on her side of the political spectrum that the United States is indeed something worth celebrating." It's a little late for that. But the editors say she's "well-positioned to make this pitch, because as the child of immigrants and a woman of color, she represents in her very candidacy the progress the country has seen." As if this big occasion should revolve around her: Celebrate me! Because I embody what's worth celebrating!


The Atlantic article says that Biden dealt with the "meltdown" at the commission by appointing Rosie Rios as the commission chair. Under her, the key concept seems to be a "radically decentralized" social-media concept called "America's Stories" — a website where anybody/everybody writes anything. This would be inclusive, but it would include all the hostility against America that we expect from the left. Would they resort to censorship? They would have to! 


The Atlantic writer, the Yale historian Beverly Gage, says:

For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths.

Next time you propose a toast at a birthday party, try exposing a darker story behind the self-congratulatory myths.

As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.

So you and your fellow historians devoted yourself to telling the "darker story" and now, as the people look to celebrate a big birthday, you are worried that they aren't going to frame the event around your dark story but will look to the kind of characters — the "darker forces" — that you've been disparaging all these years? People are drawn to the good — to an uplifting idea of what the country means — and you see that very optimism as an embrace of the darkness.

Nearing the end, the historian comes out with: "[N]ow that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag?" Well, for one thing, flying a U.S. flag at your house is regarded as equivalent to having a Trump yard sign.

We have a U.S. flag at our front door. But I'd consider bringing it inside for the next few weeks, because I don't like exacerbating the anguish in the neighborhood as the impending Make-America-Great-Again victory comes into focus.