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Okay, that’s fine, but it does mean that conservatives had a pretty massive blind spot that they hadn’t even tried to consider very deeply, doesn’t it? You’d have to be a special sort of blinkered not to look at the actual semantic content of the National Anthem itself - not to mention the larger constellation of military- and state-affirming symbology which surrounds the presentation of the anthem at a sporting event - a presentation that very often includes not only the physical presence of active-duty military personnel but also a fly-over by genuine military-grade aircraft - and think, “This doesn’t contain any ideological content about citizens’ relationship with their government.”
This is what so frustrated me during the whole Kaepernick situation, because like every other American here, I was around during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and I saw firsthand the consequences of just rubber-stamping everything your government and your military decide to do. (“They’re fighting for our freedom,” etc.) I would have thought, naïvely, that maybe conservatives would have at least developed some awareness that there is actual political/ideological content behind all the flag-waving patriotic stuff, but apparently even all these years later they’re still using the patriotic symbolism as a license to turn off the analytical part of their brains entirely and fall back on “none of this is political, I just want to grill.”
To be clear, pride is the exact same thing from the left- progressives claim it’s not political, it’s just that some people oppose it because they’re bigots.
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