Remember Norman Thomas
We are in a struggle to save our country.
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear understands that Trump II is not Trump I; the goals of the president this time around are far more radical and the means far less lawful.
Looking back, the first Trump administration seems to be defined almost more by its tone and governing style than by the substantive heft of its policies. It was often chaotic and always nasty. Mean tweets, bald-faced lies, and intramural melodramas mark Trump’s first term as much as his tax cuts, deregulation efforts or the Abraham Accords do. He’ll tell you it was the greatest presidential term of all the presidencies in the history of the universe. But it wasn’t. It was pretty ordinary, as presidencies go (until January 6th).
Still, something extraordinary was happening. Trump didn’t really know how to govern after his victory in 2016, and he still doesn’t, in some important ways. But he can perform. He performs like no other American politician ever has. And what he performed in his first term was the possibility of a breathtaking change, of an American strongman, a Great Leader in the Oval Office, unbounded by all the dreary checks and balances and decencies of constitutional governance and even, it turned out, of free and fair elections.
That possibility was, for millions of Americans, absolutely thrilling. It meant, many felt and still feel, change in their own lives. And large bipartisan majorities of Americans have been clamoring for years for big changes in a nation that is simply not working for far too many of us.
Trump II? This is the real deal, Trumpism fully fueled. For four years, Trump’s minions at Project 2025 and elsewhere have combed through the statute books and court precedents looking for every crease and crevice of ambiguity in the laws of our country that they could crowbar open in order to supercharge presidential power. That’s why the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 has been resurrected. That’s why Trump federalized the National Guard in California. That’s why his Department of Justice makes arguments in several cases that courts have no role in when it comes to checking or even reviewing some presidential actions and authorities. This Trump term is planned, organized and executed at a far higher level of competence and efficiency than anything seen in his first term.
And the goal is now clear: to achieve a fundamental change in American democracy. To use the vast powers of the presidency to force individuals, institutions and even great corporations into submission and silence. To punish dissenters and reward allies and toadies. To use law enforcement to spread fear in the land.
This is what’s happening. This is why the stakes are so high for us right now. And, as I’ve said here before, this is why it feels to me like such a privilege to be alive and an American at this moment in our history. We get to stand up and join in the struggle to save our nation. That is good work.
So what does Norman Thomas have to do with all of this?
I believe we must wage this struggle with pride and with love for our country in our hearts, with real patriotism. Sometimes, in recent decades, some on the liberal-left have found it hard to express that simplest of emotions: patriotism. They seem to see American history as a catalogue of unredeemable sins. That’s not true. And it is one of the most natural and honorable of human emotions to love the land you’re from and want to protect it and keep it precious.
That’s the way I feel right now. That’s why I loved seeing so many American flags at the amazing No Kings protests last weekend. And that’s why we should remember Norman Thomas.
Thomas was one of the great American dissenters and socialists. Now, I am in no way, shape, form, or fashion a socialist. I like to say I’m a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. But I’ve always admired him, and not just because my grandfather voted for him one of the six times he ran for president.
Thomas was a man of deep convictions and high principles. A Christian minister from Marion, Ohio, he was a pacifist in World War I, a co-founder of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, a precursor of the ACLU, though he broke with the ACLU when it refused to condemn the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. And at the end of his life, in his eighties, he marched against the Vietnam War.
And that’s what’s relevant to me now.
Attending an anti-war protest, Thomas saw some students burning the American flag, and it shocked him to his core. Though he had dissented his whole life from much of what the US government did and stood for, he could not abide seeing his country’s flag burning.
He told those students, “I don’t want to burn the flag. I want to wash it.”
Yes. That’s how you do the good work of saving our beloved country.
I love this. My mother was arrested when I was in grade school for washing the American flag in front of the plaza hotel. She explained that she was washing the filth out of the county’s foreign policy (it was the height of Vietnam). She was a true patriot and always told my sisters and I to fly the flag because it belongs to all of us.
100%.
I carried the American flag at Portland’s No Kings rally. I carried it as the symbol of our All-American movement, remembering how “they” carried the Confederate Stars & Bars through the Capitol Rotunda on January 6th. And the Nazi Swastika through the streets of Charlottesville. And the “Don’t Tread on Me” coiled snake flag at maga rallies. I say let them have their flags of trump and treason. The American flag belongs to all of us. Democrats, Independents, Republicans. But not to those who would do harm to America or to Americans. At the rally I saw so many signs with terrific messages: “Human Need before Corporate Greed”, "Make America Moral Again”, A Better World is Possible”, "IKEA has Better Cabinets”, “Does This Ass Make My Country Look Smaller?”. By waving the Stars & Stripes — right-side-up — my message was, “We love our country, and this is our flag,” a symbol of resistance and renewal.