So, how did Lady Gaga manage to vaguely please just about every faction of an audience nearly as large as America’s voting public? Surely (and depressingly), her whiteness alone helped soothe racists anxious to interpret every artist of color’s raised fist or Black Lives Matter T-shirt as a call to violent revolution. In fact, her glittery, revealing, but not at all outré costumes and surprisingly minimalist, American flag-themed stage set represent dozens of missed opportunities to make an explicit partisan statement. In another apparent attempt to avoid controversy, she cleaned up even the relatively apolitical hits she performed. An abbreviated take on “Poker Face” allowed Gaga to get in her Texas shout-out without scandalizing anyone with her bluffin’ muffin. Although she and her dancers seemed to be trolling the game a bit by performing “Bad Romance” in campy football drag, this edit of the song was conspicuously free of “rear window” innuendos.

Sure, a handful of credible left-leaning critics rightly accused a rarely subtle artist of playing it safe, while others cringed at her repetition of well-intentioned but offensive lyrics that refer to Asian people as “Orient” and Latina heritage as “Chola descent,” in a rather inelegant rhyme. But most of the liberals in my Twitter feed simply cheered her choice to perform “Born This Way”—a bland, Madonna-lite love letter to human biodiversity that suddenly (and worryingly) sounds more subversive now than it did upon its release in 2011.

That “Born This Way” raised so few right-wing eyebrows may be a sign that Obama-era progress on queer and trans rights was more permanent than some might worry. But Christian conservatives who may have otherwise been put off by Gaga’s unwavering advocacy for the LGBT community (like Gaga’s fellow Catholic, Rubio) likely also appreciated her many invocations of God. Not only is “Million Reasons” a sort of prayer, but “Born This Way” justifies its embrace of diversity with the lyric, “God makes no mistakes,” and a verse in which Gaga recalls her mother telling her, “There's nothing wrong with loving who you are… ‘Cause He made you perfect, babe.” “God” was even the first word of her performance, which kicked off with a medley of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

What’s remarkable is that Gaga’s decision to open with these early-20th-century hymns to American exceptionalism felt just as political as “Born This Way.” In any other year, those selections might have come across as safe crowd pleasers—or even appeals to a brand of patriotism that had become the exclusive province of flag-waving conservatives in the years since 9/11. But, as many have pointed out, “This Land” was written by avowed socialist Woody Guthrie, and its inclusive vision of America has made it a fixture of recent pro-immigrant protests. There’s even a bit of relevant subtext to “God Bless America,” whose author, Irving Berlin, was a Jewish immigrant. Trump voters may not have heard those dog whistles, but plenty of viewers on the left certainly did.

It was a performance that, at least for a few minutes, united the tens of millions of Americans who believe in bans and walls with the tens of millions who believe that our nation should remain open to the world’s tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But it also revealed how quickly and dramatically our national conversation around patriotism has changed. With Trump praising Putin and defying the Constitution in the name of making America great again, while activists on the left don Statue of Liberty crowns and appropriate Pledge of Allegiance words like “indivisible,” love of country is suddenly more ripe for liberal reclamation than it has been since before the Red Scare.

In this context, Gaga’s decision to quote the Pledge’s “indivisible” line at the beginning of her performance doesn’t seem like a mistake. Which isn’t to say that fans who were disappointed by her lack of a brave or brazen move—of the sort that we’ve seen celebrities make at a string of recent award shows—are wrong. But there’s no question that there was a sly political statement behind the Halftime Show’s Americana theme—a message of hope to the left, if not a pithy attack on the right. For those of us who are already aware of the new connotations to the word “indivisible,” and see ourselves as part of the project of reclaiming American identity, her stars-and-stripes pastiche resonated as a low-key endorsement of a new brand of patriotism.