The fire that tests us

Reason marks the anniversary of Texas v. Johnson, decided June 21, 1989 — the case in which the Supreme Court held, by a margin of five to four, that Gregory Lee Johnson's act of burning the American flag outside the 1984 Republican National Convention was expression protected by the First Amendment. It is worth pausing on that anniversary, because few decisions in modern times have so cleanly revealed the fault line between a republic that trusts itself and one that does not.

I wrote in the Declaration that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent, to mean anything at all, must include the right to withhold it — loudly, visibly, even theatrically. A citizen who may praise the republic but not condemn it is not a citizen; he is a subject with a more comfortable title. The moment a government arrogates to itself the power to declare certain ideas unspeakable, it has claimed a jurisdiction that belongs to no government on earth.

The defenders of the Texas statute argued, in substance, that the flag is too sacred a symbol to be touched by dissent. I understand the sentiment; I do not accept the logic. The flag derives whatever honor it holds from the liberty it represents. To protect the cloth by destroying the liberty is to burn down the house in order to save the furniture. The Court, on this occasion, chose the house.

I will note — and I say this as one who lived the contradiction I now name plainly — that the history of this republic is full of men who celebrated liberty in the abstract while suppressing it in the particular. I was among them. The Alien and Sedition Acts of my own era, signed by my predecessor and resisted by me, were precisely that kind of betrayal: the state deciding that certain criticism of power was too dangerous to permit. Every generation faces its own version of that temptation, and every generation must refuse it.

The ruling in Texas v. Johnson was not a celebration of flag-burning. It was a recognition that a government confident in its own legitimacy has no need to outlaw symbols of disapproval. Republics are not fragile icons to be locked behind glass; they are arguments, conducted in public, to which every citizen is entitled to contribute — in ink, in speech, or, yes, in fire. The republic that can endure criticism is the only kind worth defending. That is not sentiment. That is the architecture of free government.