The July 4 white supremacist march exposes an uncomfortable truth about our country

(RNS) — It should be a contradiction that the Confederate flag was marched alongside the Betsy Ross flag through the streets near the U.S. Capitol on Independence Day.

The rebel banner was brought to the Capitol by hundreds of masked agents associated with Patriot Front, a white supremacist hate group founded after the 2017 showdown over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia. It waved in the wind alongside the flag of the 13 colonies and upside-down U.S. flags — a symbol of national distress — seeming to imply they were calling a nation in peril back to, or closer to, the exclusionary democratic vision of its founders. They echoed this in their chants to “reclaim America.”

But the hateful demonstration recalled a dissonance that has always been present in America’s politics.

Erin Wilson, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in response : “The white nationalist hate group, the Patriot Front, hid behind masks and marched the streets of Washington, D.C., ironically representing the opposite of patriotism.”

Many Americans fall prey to the temptation to agree with Wilson that overt racists marching Washington, D.C., streets on the…