"symbolic example" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it when you are illustrating an idea or concept through an example which is not literal but more figurative. For example, "Her hat blowing away in the wind was a symbolic example of her fear of commitment."
And Dempsey is a very particular symbolic example – his "homecoming" from Tottenham to Seattle in 2013, started a wave of such reverse migrations from Europe by top US players to MLS, in the months leading up to the World Cup.
His effort to raise the minimum age for a partial pension to 62 from 60 and for a full pension to 67 from 65 is a visible and symbolic example of a loss of a highly prized social gain achieved under the opposition Socialists.
Rikers stands as one terrible, symbolic example of the horrors of mass incarceration.
Junk is piled up on the porch, an obvious symbolic example of how these two old folk have been tossed on the trash heap, forgotten by their families and friends (those that are still alive, that is).
He echoed DBCOOPA's sentiments, "Israel is in a PR war and it's succeeding generally, most of the time, but it's a PR war with the Palestinian people who are landing severe hits that embarrassed the state of Israel... Anonymous is a cool group to most people, so when Anonymous does something like OpIsrael, it creates a real symbolic example.
Another recent and very symbolic example is LacI, the repressor of the lac operon.
Some of them were symbolic; for example, an unidentified man once hit Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who is an opposition leader, on the head with a chess board.
So does the Peruvian ceramist Daniela Ortiz, who incorporates plenty of verbal and symbolic agitation — for example, against the colonialist legacy of monuments to Christopher Columbus — into her satirical, terrific painted pots and figurines, but with a charm that quite disarms militancy.
Projective geometry, set theory, and symbolic logic are examples of systems with underlying lattice structures, and therefore also have principles of duality.
Conceptual and symbolic uses are examples of new procedural policy instruments that facilitate multidirectional interactions between diverse groups in governance.
Recent examples, symbolic but perhaps signs of distance from Khamenei's authority, are Rouhani and foreign minister Javad Zarif wishing "Jews around the world, especially Iranian Jews" (about 10,000 of them) a "blessed" Jewish New Year.
