The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American

Shouldn't the government pledge allegiance to the

people rather than the other way around?
The Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative
Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was
written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive
Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus
anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist
from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling
utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in
which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an
industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working
poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)

The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals
that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often
accompanied recitation of the pledge with "the Bellamy salute," a stiff-armed salute of the
ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil
Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the
heart.

In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the
reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the
Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all." In 1923 WASP
nativists prevailed in having "my flag" replaced by "the flag of the United States of America," to
make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren't pledging
allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words "under God," following an
influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the
Cold War should be ancient Sparta.

Could anything be more foreign to America's enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican
traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?

The very idea of a pledge of allegiance, in any form, is completely at odds with what is often
called "the American Creed," inspired by the 17th-century philosopher John Locke's theory of
natural rights and government by popular consent. The concept of "allegiance" is feudal. In
medieval Europe, the liegeman, or subject, pledged allegiance to his liege lord. But in Lockean
America, there is no government outside of society to which the members of the society could
pledge allegiance, even if they wanted to. As the scholar Mark Hulliung explains Lockean liberal
theory in "The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age" (2007):

There is a social contract by which the people bind themselves to one another, but no
subsequent political contract [between people and government]. The rulers hold power
temporarily, as mere "trustees" of the people ... What the people give they can take away
whenever they please, because they are bound by no contract between governors and governed.

In a republic, the people should not pledge allegiance to the government; the government should
pledge allegiance to the people.
If we Americans as individuals do not owe personal allegiance to federal, state and local
governments, in the way that medieval subjects owed personal allegiance to feudal lords and
kings, then what is the basis of our obligation to obey the laws? The answer is that as members
of the sovereign people we owe each other an obligation to obey the rules that we, directly or
through elected representatives, have mutually agreed on. The members of a condo association
agree with each other to obey the rules they ratify. Part of their mutual obligation involves carrying
out the legitimate instructions of the manager whom they have hired. But while the members of
the association may agree to obey directions from their common employee, no condo association
pledges allegiance to the condo manager. The principal does not swear to serve the agent.

From this it follows that the appropriate expression of patriotism in a democratic republic is not a
hierarchical, or "vertical," pledge of allegiance but a fraternal/sororal, or "horizontal," pledge of
mutual support. As it happens, we have an example of such a pledge: the Declaration of
Independence. Jefferson's famous preamble restates the Lockean theory of popular sovereignty:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Having begun the Declaration with the statement that government is merely a tool created to
serve the people, the signers could have hardly concluded with a feudal oath of fealty to the
political artifact they themselves had constructed. That would make about as much sense as
pledging obedience to your refrigerator or your cellphone. Instead, they made a pledge to one
another: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine
Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

While a pledge of allegiance by the subject to the government is incompatible with American
republican principles, a voluntary pledge of mutual support among the people who collectively
create and own the government might be useful, if only as a succinct catechism of the American
Creed. If we drop the strained and unnecessary language about "their Creator" and "divine
Providence," designed to offend neither Christians nor 18th-century Deists, and replace the
topical phrase "this Declaration" with a reference to the enduring principles of republican liberty,
we might get something like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. And for the support of these
principles, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Call this purely voluntary pledge the Citizens' Pledge of Mutual Support for the Principles of the
Declaration of Independence, or simply, the Citizens' Pledge. It would be addressed by
Americans directly to one another, rather than to the flag or any other symbol of the state. Oh,
and if you give a stiff-armed salute, you'll be sent to the principal's office.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/11/16/pledge_of_allegiance/index.h
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The “Pledge” DISHONOURS everything our Confederate fathers fought for.