The Minnesota State Flag: Another Front Of The Cold Civil War

Like most sixth-graders who grew up in the Gopher State, I had a Minnesota history class back in 1989 where my classmates and I were given a detailed analysis of the Minnesota state flag originally devised in 1957.  On one hand, the class where we broke down the meaning and symbolism of the Minnesota state flag stuck with me over the years.  But on the other hand, I never really thought much about the Minnesota flag in the 35 years since I was in sixth grade.  And I'd venture to say that that's true of the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, whose kinship with their state's flag began and ended in sixth-grade history class.  At least that was the case until 2023 when somebody decided to change it.

Specifically, a few members of the Minnesota Legislature decided it was time for a change and eventually got consensus to form a redesign commission that would accept multiple design proposals submitted by the public and vote on the configuration of a new flag and state seal.  And so was born another inevitable culture war battlefield...

It shouldn't have been surprising.  The vast majority of people instinctively hate cultural change.  Our necks tend to get even redder when said change is being made to a symbol of heritage, even if it's a symbol they haven't thought about since they were 12 years old on the elementary school field trip to the State Capitol.  I'm not sure there was ever a scenario where the adoption of a new state flag would engender anything but contempt from a majority of Minnesotans, but change advocates really poisoned the well when articulating their short list of reasons why the 1957 flag had to be replaced.

They said it was interchangeable with too many other state flags with activity centered within a circle amidst a blue back drop.  And it's true that many other states adopted cookie-cutter designs for their state flag and it's very hard to tell which one is which from a distance.  Change advocates also suggested the imagery is cluttered and clunky, with far too much going on inside that compressed circular image.  And they have a point.  Sometimes less is more, and that's probably true of the 1957 flag design.  But it's the third reason occasionally cited as an impetus for changing the state flag that generated the most chatter and the most righteous opposition.  Some critics alleged that the flag was, wait for it, racist!!!

To be fair, I don't believe any of the members of the State Emblems Redesign Commission leveled this accusation, but plenty of others did, including someone as high up the food chain as Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.  She refused to display the flag and claimed it was a visual representation of Manifest Destiny.  Even though very few people had any idea what that reference meant, the accusation of racism formally calcified that this process was gonna be divisive and culturally poisonous.

The commission moved forward with the process, narrowing down more than 2,000 design submissions to the entry that would ultimately be selected in the spring of 2024, a flag that combines a dark blue and light blue background with a north star symbol.  And how is it going over?

A local news poll gave the new flag a 23% approval rating shortly after its rollout.  Another 21% of respondents said they were fine with a new state flag in principle but didn't like the chosen design, while a full 49% wanted to keep the existing state flag. Seven Minnesota counties passed resolutions either opposing the new flag or the process by which it was chosen.

Well that didn't go so well!

But no worries.  The new flag's defenders assure us the public will come around in time.

A year has passed and I informally put that to the test during a road trip to western Minnesota this summer.  There was nothing scientific about my "windshield poll" but considering I was venturing through a vast expanse of old-school DFL territory--the kinds of places where stubborn Lutheran farmers reflexively voted Democrat every two years until the 2016 realignment--I thought it would make for an interesting visual experiment.

The result:  I saw more 1957 Minnesota state flags flown loud and proud in 2025, a year after it was repealed, than I had since my sixth-grade Minnesota class in 1989.  How many new state flags did I see flapping in the wind of the western Minnesota prairies?  One....in a courthouse lawn.  And that's despite the new flag design coming from one of their own as the selected submission was created by an artist from Luverne.

Indeed, sales of the old flag have outpaced sales of the new flag ever since May 2024.  I'm sure the imbalance isn't nearly as imbalanced in the metro area, but that's exactly the point.  The decision to adopt a new flag was inevitably poised to elicit a visually prescient ideological schism.  Even outside of election seasons, the split sides of Minnesota's ideological Mason-Dixon line would be exposed in front yards throughout the state. That would have been true no matter which design was selected and no matter what process was used for the selection, at least outside of a ballot measure where, again, virtually any design would have led to tribal fault line development and certain failure.

But to be honest, it's rather impressive that the commission did as amazing of a job as they did in unifying the state....in opposition.  I'm not sure if that 23% approval rating of the new flag measured shortly after its inception holds, but I have my doubts that it's engendered a great deal more support a year later.  I don't really care much about what the state flag looks like, but even I have to admit it comes across as pretty slight.  It certainly isn't compelling enough to justify the tangible displays of disunity and the inevitable ascent of the old Minnesota state flag as detractors' version of the Confederate battle flag.

My guess is that if I take to the highways of outstate Minnesota 10 years from now, I'll continue to see 1957 state flags flapping in the yards of people who couldn't have even identified the Minnesota state flag from a lineup in 2022.  Our cultural divisions don't seem poised to in any way diminish in the years ahead, so representations of rebellion and nonconformity will only gain in currency. 

Conservative Star Tribune columnist Andy Brehm wrote an op-ed last month suggesting that the problem is the new flag's "ugly" design and the exclusive process is what ginned up such enduring opposition, and that if we started over from scratch, we could find an agreeable middle ground. But I think he's naive.  There's no symbol of contemporary Minnesota--or America for that matter--than can unify us, and there's no governing body that most people would accept as fair arbiters.  People opposed to cultural change are gonna find some comparison to the "Somali flag" no matter what design any "commission" agrees upon, no matter how bipartisan.  They're also unlikely to accept any alternative to an existing design they believe is being discarded based on dubious accusations of white supremacy.

Defiance against the new Minnesota state flag is merely the latest pit stop of our cold civil war, consistent with my assessment before the November election that "owning the libs" is no longer just a hobby but a lifestyle, bordering on a religion.  The inverse is that finding racism under every rock became a religion of its own for those on the other side of the battle lines.  Even if one side blinks, the road to unification is nowhere in sight.  It's hard to imagine an uglier manifestation of that than living in a state where different sides of the ideological spectrum are flying different state flags in protest of the other.  But that's where we are, and Minnesota is far from being the only state where it's 1861 all over again.