Politics & Power Quote by John Shimkus

Patriotism is doing a lot of work here - and that is the point. Shimkus frames support for the military as an identity claim ("I am proud") before it becomes a policy claim, turning a contested arena of budgets, deployments, and strategy into a moral posture the listener is meant to share. The Republican Party isn’t just voting a certain way; it "stands for" something, as if it were a fixed virtue rather than a coalition with shifting priorities.

The repeated "support" is deliberately elastic. It can mean higher defense spending, more generous VA funding, a hawkish foreign policy, or simply rhetorical solidarity at campaign season. That ambiguity is politically useful: it allows agreement across factions that might diverge sharply on what support should actually look like, especially when "dangerous places around the world" hints at ongoing wars or open-ended counterterror operations without naming any of their costs.

"Men and women" and "their families" widens the emotional aperture. It’s not only the service member who is sanctified, but the home-front sacrifice, too. That inclusion subtly pressures dissent: questioning a mission can be made to sound like questioning the people carrying it out and the spouses and kids absorbing the strain.

The intent is reassurance and brand maintenance. In a post-9/11 political culture where "support the troops" became a civic litmus test, the line signals reliability to voters, donors, and defense constituencies while sidestepping the harder, more divisive questions: Which wars? For how long? With what oversight? The power is in what it refuses to specify.