One Thousand Footballmen, Standing for the Flag

I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.

The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?”  And so on.

However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.

It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity.  For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die.  In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.

Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.

America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small.  However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.

And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.  

Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.

Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts.  It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.