Bernie Sanders Wears No US Flag Pin

There is a decades-old custom followed by most candidates for the presidency of wearing American flag pins on their left coat lapel. Of course, wearing an American flag lapel pin doesn’t mean very much. It doesn’t really prove that you are genuinely patriotic or genuinely love America.

But failure to follow that trivial practice tends to be noticed and to provoke comment. Barack Obama ran into questions from reporters about not wearing one back in 2007. Obama initially characteristically sneered at the custom, but pressure mounted and by the next Spring of the election year, Candidate Obama fell into line and began wearing the flag pin.

In the run-up to this election, we have another representative of the radical left-wing of the democrat party who is obviously more comfortable denouncing America for institutionalized injustice than participating in conventional displays of patriotic symbols. Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (as you can see in the above photo) has been substituting a gold lapel pin in the place of that conventional US flag.

Naturally, one wondered: Is it a small gold hammer-and-sickle? Is he wearing (sentimentally) the symbol of the IWW (Wobblies)? Looking into it, I found that I was not the first to inquire. And the correct answer may be given here.

Bernie Sanders is deliberately side-stepping the flag lapel pin issue, by wearing instead the gold badge which identifies him in the Capitol building to security as a US Senator.

After all, how could we expect Senator Sanders to wear the flag of a country like ours. Senator Sanders denounced America as unjust in a speech he delivered just yesterday evening.

[I]n my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. ..

[T]here is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

What would Sanders do if he were present for the playing on the national anthem?