Isaac Fitzgerald

Because Harris and Walz get that symbols are a powerful force to unite a divided country

The Gadsden flag—better known as the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag—wasn’t always a symbol of right-wing extremism.

Long before it was waved by a mob of misled misanthropes storming the steps of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it had a long life, including—but not limited to—as a gay rights’ advocacy symbol (with a rainbow added) in the 1990s, a revolutionary leftist symbol in the 1970s, and, of course, as a symbol of unity among the colonies back when it was first dreamed up in the 1770s. Does the flag have a perfect history? Absolutely not. Neither does this country. That said, I don’t know if the phrase “perfect history” pertains to any one thing—or anything, for that matter—in the entirety of human existence.

I’ve been thinking a lot about symbols, especially those co-opted by the Right. At times, it can feel like the American flag itself belongs to one political party, which is a shame, while at the same time being utterly untrue. At its core, the American flag is a symbol of unity—same as the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag’s original intended purpose. Or maybe a better way of putting it is: the hope for unity, much like the Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness.” Not guaranteed, but well worth reaching for.

Am I talking about substantive policy here? No. But I do believe symbols are important and, well, the Democrats haven’t historically been very competent at playing the image-metaphor game. Why, for instance, are Republicans represented by elephants, while Democrats are represented by donkeys? (The answer is that Thomas Nast, a cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly in the mid-1800s, was very much a supporter of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party—which would fit more with our modern idea of a conservative Democrat—but that’s a story for another time.)

In more recent history, Democrats have been handily losing the merch wars since 2015, when a certain red baseball cap came on the scene. You know the one.

Which is why—with all my thinking about co-opted symbols—it brought a smile to my face when Eric Ziminsky (who has done design work for Joe Biden) tweeted on August 6, “hear me out…” along with a mock-up of a “Harris-Walz” camouflage hat. Eric shared his visual prototype while retweeting a post from user @heyjaeee that read, “A Midwest princess,” along with an image of Tim Walz’s face superimposed over Chappell Roan on the cover of her latest album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Roan—a Missouri native who grew up in a conservative Christian community and is currently one of America’s biggest pop stars—sold her own camo hat which read, “Midwest Princess” in hunter orange. The hat is listed as “sold out” on her website, and was the clear inspiration for Ziminsky’s design.

Before August 6th was over, the Harris Walz campaign had an actual camo hat for sale on their website and Chappell Roan had tweeted a picture of it saying, "is this real." The hat was indeed real, and in just a few days—as was recently reported by the New York Times—the campaign had sold over 50,000 of 'em. That's a damn high number of hats, and by the end of the month they had sold out of their entire inventory. To date, the campaign is tight-lipped about how many hats they've sold overall, but the camo lid is currently back in their merch shop.

I spent my early adolescent years in north Central Massachusetts. We hunted every year. Deer season. Turkey season. Friends’ fathers would take us out, sitting in blinds, handing us not-exactly-cold beers as we waited for animals to come within range. Sometimes rifles. Sometimes compound bows, the strings of which I could barely pull back. We wore camouflage and bright orange vests and hats. “The food always tastes better when you hunt it yourself,” I remember a man telling me, and that man was right.

When it was just us kids, we played with war BB guns and bottle rockets in the forest near our homes, and bought heavy, old, green combat helmets and camo jackets from the Army Navy surplus store in the town over the hill. We watched Platoon and Apocalypse Now, but also Navy Seals and Red Dawn, not really understanding the difference. Many of my friends went on to serve in the military, like their fathers and uncles did—and occasionally their mothers and aunts, too. Many of my friends still serve to this day. Weddings in dress uniforms, camo T-shirts and pants, backpacks, key chains, and beer openers threaded through everyday life.

It wasn’t only hunting and the military, though. I also skateboarded when I was young. Those same jackets bought at the Army Navy surplus store are somehow also signs of youthful rebellion. Skateboard companies—themselves a combination of antiestablishment attitudes while also profiting off said attitudes, like good capitalist companies—were soon slapping camo on shoes, skateboards, and T-shirts, to mimic the style of poor kids buying cheap clothes at the Army Navy surplus stores in the ’90s.

But it’s not like we—or the skateboard companies—invented that. Dating back to the Vietnam War, and the protests around it—and even World War II, with vets in Oakland and the Bay Area protesting the lack of affordable housing—camo has been both a symbol of patriotism and skepticism alike.

As long as camo has been a part of the military and hunting culture, it’s also been a part of counterculture. Two sides of the same coin. The “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. The American flag. This country. Two sometimes (often?) divided sides—a tumult of meanings behind every symbol. Every emblem. Dancing at a Chappell Roan concert, while wearing a hat that your father in Missouri might wear. Spray-painting walls in your youth, and then signing up to fight for your country.

There’s a reason the “Harris-Walz” camo hat has become such a phenomenon, sparking countless articles and pushing a New Jersey factory to the brink. It’s because it feels like a bringing together of cultures, instead of the division of one. The intended purpose of more than a few flags I can think of, which are now used for the latter.

My hat arrived in the mail the other day. It’s union-made in the USA, unlike certain red hats that come to mind. It looks good. There’s an American flag stitched into the back. It joins the countless other camo clothes that I’ve owned throughout my life. But what it really comes down to is that the Democrats finally have a piece of merch that works.

Politics shouldn’t be fandom, and nobody—no campaign nor candidate—is perfect. But there’s nothing wrong with having a cool-as-shit hat that helps fund your fight for democracy.

Isaac Fitzgerald lives on Long Island with his wife, Kelly Farber, and their two dogs, Zorra and Hobbes.