For a few years now, I’ve had this vague sense that the U.S. flag is at half-staff more often than it used to be. This appears to be true.

This is generated from presidential proclamations downloaded from the federal register. You can find the CSV I produced by processing this data here. Many of these data points could easily be off by a few days, since much of the processing was automated (by a combination of keyword heuristics to find the relevant proclamations, and then AI to extract dates). Even the stuff that I did by hand can easily be off by a day or two: determining when a particular person was interred, and therefore when the flags were restored to full height, is not always easy! Don’t rely on small differences in the number of days: 20 vs 24 days may not be meaningful.

That being said, there’s a pretty clear overall trend, and two multi-year periods during which the flag was lowered more than 10% of the time: 2004-2006 and 2021-2024. I was born in 1993 and my political memory begins around 2007 (when I began high school). My memory seems to reflect something real: the flag is lowered two or three times more often now, than it was when I was in high school.

I don’t know how seriously to take these trends. On the one hand, a lot of these lowering are due to the deaths of major public figures. In that sense we’re looking at a particular generation that overperformed in public service, and has over the last few years begun to rapidly die off.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel that there’s been rising public negativity since 2016. (This has been a favorite topic for Tyler Cowen, for example.) Start-dates vary, but not by that much. Depending the color of your political skin, you associate this negativity either to “woke” or to “Trump”. It is interesting to note that this rising negativity is also reflected in the flag being lowered more often.