Politics & Power Quote by Gary Ackerman

The line dares you to separate patriotism from panic. Ackerman isn’t defending flag-burning as a noble act; he’s shrinking it back down to what he thinks it actually is: a provocation by “a jerk,” a small performance designed to hijack the national nervous system. That blunt insult does key work. It lets him acknowledge the visceral disgust many people feel while still refusing the escalated storyline that says symbolic desecration equals existential danger.

The intent is triage. In the long-running American debate over flag desecration amendments, opponents have argued that protecting the flag requires limiting speech. Ackerman flips the burden: the real threat to democracy isn’t the person with a lighter; it’s the state deciding that certain symbols are too sacred to criticize, mock, or even angrily reject. By listing “America,” “democracy,” and “freedom” in escalating, almost alarm-bell terms, he mimics the rhetoric used to sell crackdowns, then drains it of its power with a flat denial.

Subtext: a confident country can tolerate offense. The quote is also a warning about moral inflation. When every ugly gesture is treated like an invasion, politics becomes a permanent emergency, and emergencies are where rights go to die. Ackerman’s minimalism is rhetorical discipline: keep the national story proportional to the act, and you keep opportunists from converting outrage into law.

Context matters: post-Vietnam, post-culture wars, and especially in the shadow of Supreme Court rulings like Texas v. Johnson, this is liberal constitutionalism with a streetwise edge - defending free expression without romanticizing the expression itself.