Flags of Shame. Politics and Symbols in Contemporary Debates

Flags have become a battlefield of choice in politics. This state of affairs is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. A visible turning point in the process of the desacralization of the flag has been the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Texas v. Johnson (1989). The social and intellectual threads that have led us here are numerous, including the nineteenth-century debates occasioned by the Confederate flag and the controversies regarding the symbols of the revolutionary Left. Ruth Benedict’s distinction (1946) between “shame cultures” and “guild cultures” has provided a conceptual frame to advance the understanding of the meaning of highly symbolic actions to desecrate the national flag. In the twenty-first century, after imperial cultures and identities decline, shaming the flag has become part of the narrative of political polarization in many democracies worldwide.