Loyal to Nothing — Except the Dream: What Captain America Taught Me About the 4th of July

Every 4th of July I think about a man in a flag suit telling America it's a piece of trash.

That sounds like the setup to a bad joke, so let me back up. My political beliefs — the actual load-bearing beams of how I see the world — were built by two comic book characters: Superman and Captain America. Superman showed me what absolute power looks like when it refuses to corrupt absolutely. A being who could take anything he wanted and instead spends his life catching falling planes and listening to people nobody else listens to. That's one half of my moral compass.

Captain America is the other half, and he's the one I think about on Independence Day. Because Cap has never — not once, when written correctly — represented what America is. He represents what America should be. He is the voice of reason in the room, the moral check on the government whose colors he wears, the guy who fights for the people and with the people whenever the powerful get out of line. He's not a soldier who follows orders. He's a conscience with a shield.

"A Nation Is Nothing! A Flag Is a Piece of Cloth!"

The clearest statement of this ever put on a comics page is in What If? #44 (1984), "What If Captain America Were Revived Today?" by Peter B. Gillis and Sal Buscema. In it, an impostor Captain America has spent years wrapping authoritarianism in the flag, telling Americans they're the greatest people in the world and that anything is justified to preserve that greatness. When the real Steve Rogers finally returns, he doesn't reassure anyone. He tears the whole premise down in front of a crowd:

"Well, I say America is nothing! Without its ideals — its commitment to the freedom of all men — America is a piece of trash! A nation is nothing! A flag is a piece of cloth!"

Read that again on the 4th of July, of all days. The most patriotic character in comics says the flag is a piece of cloth. And he's right — because he doesn't stop there. He reminds the crowd that he fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile. Because liberty can be snuffed out here just as easily as it was in Nazi Germany. As a people, we were no different from them — the only thing that made us anything at all was our commitment to the ideals. The greatness was never guaranteed. It has to be chosen, over and over.

That's not anti-American. That's the most pro-American thing I've ever read. It's the difference between loving your country the way a drinking buddy loves you — agreeing with everything you say — and loving it the way a good parent does: believing in what you could be and refusing to accept less.

The Moral Check, Not the Office

In Captain America #250 (1980), by Roger Stern and John Byrne, both parties beg Cap to run for president. He'd win in a landslide, and he knows it. He says no. His reasoning is the whole character in miniature: the presidency is about administering the country as it exists, full of compromises and half-measures. His job is to serve the Dream — the ideal — and he can't do that from inside the machine he's supposed to keep honest. Cap works best not as the government, but as the standard the government gets measured against. When Washington goes wrong, Cap doesn't rationalize it. He's walked away from the uniform more than once rather than let it be used as a prop.

One Line That Says Everything

Which brings me to the line that means the most to me, from Daredevil #233 (1986), the finale of "Born Again" by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. A general tries to bring Cap to heel, appealing to his loyalty as a soldier. Steve Rogers answers with eight words:

"I'm loyal to nothing, General — except the Dream."

In a single, powerful line, Frank Miller demonstrated a complete understanding of who Captain America is and what he represents. Not loyal to the government. Not loyal to the flag. Not loyal to any administration, party, or general. Loyal to the Dream — the idea that this country wrote down in 1776 and has been struggling to live up to ever since. Everything else is negotiable. The Dream is not.

How the Dream Got Personal

This stopped being theoretical for me in 2000. I watched the Republican party lie about the election in Florida — watched an outcome get treated as a prize to be seized rather than a trust to be earned — and I remember thinking: this is a dangerous precedent. Then came 9/11, and the Bush administration's answer to it: a war in the Middle East sold on false pretenses, war-mongering wrapped in flag pins, and a national mood that said questioning any of it was unpatriotic. I'd read enough Captain America to know that's backwards. Questioning it is the most patriotic thing you can do.

So I got involved. I spent the early 2000s working on campaigns for Democrats — not because I believed any party has a monopoly on virtue, but because somebody had to push back, and that was the lever within reach. And in the years since, the Republican party kept drifting further from anything I could recognize: the Tea Party era, when obstruction stopped being a tactic and became the whole identity; a Muslim ban that restricted the freedom of one group of people, justified by lies, in the name of protecting everyone else. That last one should sound familiar — it's the impostor Cap's speech from What If? #44, almost word for word. Anything is justified to preserve that great treasure, that pearl of great price that is America. The further that drift went, the more I found myself anchored to the two characters who built my compass in the first place: Cap's insistence on the ideals of what this country is supposed to mean, and Superman's compassion for the people actually living in it.

When the Heroes Went Dark

Comics did something telling during those same years. It's an old pattern: when things get too bright, bring in some darkness and edge for drama. So Superman became a tyrant in Injustice. The corrupted-Superman trope became its own cottage industry — Homelander in The Boys, the Plutonian in Irredeemable. Even the films went grim and desaturated in the Snyder era. And in 2017, Marvel gave us Secret Empire: Captain America saying "Hail Hydra," the shield in service of fascism.

I grimaced at every one of them. Not because dark stories can't be well-crafted — some are. I grimaced at the premise underneath: that nobody can stay uncorrupted, that the ideals can't actually be lived up to, so let's stop pretending. That's not edgy insight. That's surrender with better cover art. I reject the premise completely. The entire point of Superman is that absolute power doesn't have to corrupt absolutely. The entire point of Captain America is that the ideals are livable — hard, demanding, sometimes lonely, but livable. These characters weren't built to be deconstructed into cautionary tales. They were built to be ideals we point to in times of darkness. An ideal that only works when times are easy was never an ideal at all — it was a decoration.

What the 4th Means to Me

And we are in a time of darkness. I'm not going to pretend otherwise on my own blog. In the Trump era, patriotism has been usurped for something ugly — the flag waved hardest by people arguing that we have to take away some people's freedoms, based on lies, to secure everyone else's. I've read that story before. It's the impostor in the Cap suit, every time. Which is exactly why believing in what this country could be and should strive for matters more now than it ever has — because if we lose sight of what we're fighting for, all that's left is what we're fighting against. And what we're fighting for is simple: making our world a little bit better, every day, for the next generation.

So when the fireworks go off tonight, I'm not celebrating a government, a party, or even a flag — a flag is a piece of cloth, remember. I'm celebrating a promise: that all of us are created equal, that liberty is worth defending precisely because it's fragile, and that the people always retain the right to call their country back to its own ideals. The 4th of July isn't America's victory lap. It's America's annual renewal of vows.

Superman taught me that power without corruption is possible. Captain America taught me that patriotism without honesty is worthless. The truest patriot in fiction is the one willing to stand in front of a crowd and say his country, stripped of its ideals, is nothing — because he believes, more than anyone, in what it could be.

That's why this 4th of July, I'm wearing my Cap shirt. Not as a costume, and not as nostalgia — as a signal. So that anyone who sees it knows there's at least one more person who still believes the idea of the United States is worth fighting for.

Do What Cap Would Do

Here's the thing about Captain America: he never once saved the day by watching from the sidelines. He didn't wait for someone more qualified. Skinny Steve Rogers kept trying to enlist before the serum — the whole point of the character is that the commitment comes first and the power comes second. And remember, when they offered him the presidency, he turned it down — because the Dream isn't defended from the top. It's defended by ordinary people who show up.

So this year, show up. There's an election in November, and it matters. Check that you're registered to vote — it takes two minutes at vote.gov — and get everyone in your house registered too. Learn who's on your ballot, all the way down to school board and county races, because that's where most of the decisions that touch your actual life get made. If you can give more, give more: volunteer for a campaign you believe in, knock doors, make calls, drive a neighbor to the polls, work an election site. And then vote like the Dream depends on it — because it does. It always has.

A nation is nothing. A flag is a piece of cloth. It's the people who show up that make it anything at all. Cap wouldn't sit this one out, and neither should we.

Happy 4th of July from all of us at Epic Panels. Be loyal to the Dream.

— Martin

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Further reading, all worth hunting down: What If? #44 (Gillis/Buscema, 1984); Captain America #250 (Stern/Byrne, 1980); Daredevil #232–233, "Born Again" (Miller/Mazzucchelli, 1986); Captain America's Bicentennial Battles (Kirby, 1976); and Waid & Samnee's Captain America run (2017).