Politics & Power Quote by Steve Buyer

Patriotism, in Steve Buyer’s telling, isn’t a flag or a slogan; it’s a service contract. The sentence tries to reframe “American” as a verb: to care, to provide, to follow through. That move is politically useful because it takes a polarizing topic (how much government should do) and relocates it into safer moral territory (what we owe people who risked their lives). Buyer is stitching together national identity and veteran welfare so tightly that to tug at one is to unravel the other.

The intent is clear: convert gratitude into policy legitimacy. By placing “men and women who wear the uniform” at the center of the “common bond,” he makes veteran care the test of civic belonging, not a budget line item. The subtext is a gentle accusation: if you don’t back robust support after service, your patriotism is performative. That’s why the phrasing keeps circling back to “care” - not “reward,” not “benefits,” but a moral duty that sounds nonpartisan even as it pressures lawmakers.

The rhetoric leans on collective pronouns (“all of us,” “we”) to manufacture consensus, smoothing over real disagreements about wars, spending, and the VA’s failures. It’s also careful about the transition from hero to human: “when they take off the uniform” signals that the obligation doesn’t end with the photo-op. In a post-9/11 political culture that celebrates troops loudly while often underfunding the aftermath, Buyer is making continuity - not applause - the definition of loyalty.