Patriotism for Suckers

Donald Trump recently posted a video on the ludicrously named Truth Social featuring a pickup truck on Long Island cruising down the highway with a painted-on image of a hog-tied Joe Biden on the tailgate, as if Biden had been kidnapped.  As expected, Democrats took umbrage, accusing Trump of inciting violence, and Trump feigned innocence, an act with which he has become extraordinarily familiar.

But Biden was not the only thing painted on that truck.  On the side was a large American flag and “Trump 2024.”  Other American flags flew from the back, as they did from an SUV that was driving ahead of the truck.

Although the Biden image is a new wrinkle, pickup trucks with outsized flags have become an all-too-common sight on American roads.  In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, other flag-bearing trucks housed occupants who felt comfortable yelling “nigger” at players and coaches of the Utah women’s basketball team.  (And yes, I use the actual word because euphemisms, such as “n-word,” mitigate both the impact and the disgust we should feel at its use.)

All this in the name of patriotism, a term defined as “devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country.”

Other artifacts favored by these defenders of the American ideal are the Gadsden flag, which depicts a coiled rattlesnake and the phrase “Don’t Tread On Me,” and bumper stickers or window decals displaying some variation of Tom Paine’s denunciation of the “sunshine patriot,” which these true patriots assure us they are not.

They are, however, nostalgic, evoking that idyllic Revolutionary War era, when citizen soldiers were indispensable, weapons abounded, freedom reigned, and the heavy boot of oppressive government was not planted on working people’s throats.  That those proclaiming these sentiments are members of the working class themselves, one of three core groups of Trump supporters—the others being evangelical Christians and wealthy opportunists, who, like Trump, sneer at the other two—is laughable.

Trump being an amoral, narcissistic profiteer who has spent the better part of his life disparaging, stiffing, and swindling the working class is irony enough, but had Trump’s working-class supporters spent any time at all learning what actually transpired during the era they venerate, they might realize that their idol and his mega-rich fellow travelers view them in precisely the same way Trump’s forebears and their fellow travelers viewed their working-class compatriots.

As suckers.

Today’s right-wing patriots are correct that it was members of their class—yeoman farmers, artisans, and other ordinary people, many of whom were immigrants—that were the backbone of the Continental Army. They froze and starved at Valley Forge, left bloody footprints in the snow on the trek to cross the Delaware, and abandoned their farms and families, sometimes for years, in the pursuit of the freedom, liberty, and prosperity that had been promised to them.

And how were these often-unpaid heroes treated by the (wealthy) leaders of a grateful nation when they came home to find themselves burdened by punishing debt and their property in ruins?

Abysmally.

The war had ignited a severe financial crisis. A good deal of fertile land had been rendered unusable to farmers, British markets had been closed off, British shippers were prohibited from buying American-built ships, the war debt was immense, and the gold and silver required to pay off most individual debt was in extremely short supply. As a result, the gross national product plummeted while foreclosures and sentences to debtors’ prisons skyrocketed.  Many of those impacted were army veterans, destitute despite being promised both back pay and pensions by some of the very people then taking their land, promises that were almost never kept.

To restore state treasuries, the ruling classes introduced massive tax increases that fell disproportionately on the now-poor, and the nation soon descended into creditor and debtor classes, neither of which had anything good to say about the other, especially when creditors resisted debtors’ calls to issue paper money to ease repayment.  Paper money would, of course, depreciate the value of the underlying currency, but would also allow many indebted farmers to maintain title to their land.

To the debtors, opponents of paper money were “flint-hearted misers who were lying in wait to buy our lands [at auction] for less than a quarter of their real value.” Creditors saw debtors as having brought their misfortune on themselves through indolence, sloth, and the willingness to live “upon the sweat of their neighbors’ brows,” sentiments that it does not take much imagination to also ascribe to Donald Trump.

Massachusetts came to epitomize the nation’s divide.  On the Atlantic Coast lay Boston and the prosperous, cosmopolitan, mercantile East, where shippers such as John Hancock and James Bowdoin, two extremely rich speculators with egos to match, grew wealthier by the day.  (They might be called the Trumps of their time, except, unlike him, they were genuinely successful businessmen.)  Inland, away from the ports, was the agrarian West, where gruff, laconic, debt-ridden farmers—the pickup truck owners—were regularly hauled into court to be deprived of their land or sent to prison.

Governor Bowdoin ignored the westerners’ plea to issue paper money. (He and Hancock handed the governorship back and forth for a decade.)  Unwilling to part with a cent, he had no intention of adopting a monetary system that would effectively write down debts, sometimes by as much as ninety percent.

Finally, in June 1786, the westerners’ frustrations boiled over and some took up arms against the ruling elite. (As opposed to taking up arms to keep them in power as happened on January 6, 2021.)  The insurgents initially confined themselves to shutting down courthouses to prevent creditors from pressing claims, but they soon grew to what seemed an impressive force, determined to overthrow a state government they saw as a tool of the rich. A similar protest began in neighboring New Hampshire and threatened to spread to other states as far away as South Carolina, where debt was crushing yeoman farmers and other artisans.

After Congress refused to bankroll a military response, Bowdoin and his fellow creditors decided to fund it themselves. By the end of January 1787, they had raised an army of 3,000 to march against less than 1,500 poorly armed rebels, now known as Shays Men for Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army who had fought at Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord.

It was no contest.  After a disastrous battle at a federal arsenal in Springfield, where the rebels had hoped to supplement their meager supply of arms, the private army ran down the stragglers and by the end of February it was all over. Some rebels were jailed, a few hanged, and the rest disarmed and sent home with no debt relief to be had.  Shays himself fled to Vermont, which, not yet in the Union, was technically a foreign country.

(The following year, however, Bowdoin was defeated for re-election and the new legislature cut taxes and ended foreclosures. The Shays men were given conditional pardons and Shays himself died in New York in 1825.)

As a military action, Shays’s Rebellion had not amounted to much.  Nevertheless, the prospect of an another armed uprising terrified both the creditor class in the North and the plantation class in South, where rebellious farmers might also incite a slave revolt.  The growing unrest emphasized the need for a stronger national government to prevent wholesale insurrection.

And so, nationalists such as Madison, Hamilton, and John Dickinson were able to persuade Congress to call a national convention, set for May 1787 in Philadelphia, to strengthen the fatally weak Articles of Confederation.  While they produced some limited democracy—only the upper classes had any real say in choosing the nation’s leaders—they also empowered the government to put down another populist uprising, should one arise.

In the end, farmers and artisans were left little better off under the new Constitution than they had been under the Articles. And so, those flag wavers who wish so ardently for a return to the good old days might bear in mind that the vast improvement in the lot of the working class over the past two centuries is due far more to the Joe Bidens of American history than the Donald Trumps.

Trump views patriotism as a sucker play, the same as he views anything in which people make sacrifices or show consideration to others.  The pretend patriots in the pickup trucks have offered themselves up as prime suckers, so they have earned whatever fleecing Trump cares to foist on them.

The rest of us can only hope they do not bring the country down with them.