Politics & Power Quote by Jim DeMint

DeMint’s line wraps an ideological agenda in the soft packaging of economic anxiety. “Secure the best jobs” sounds like a universal promise, but the sentence quickly narrows who gets treated as the protagonist: “America” as an abstract marketplace, and “do business” as the master lever that supposedly moves everything else. It’s a classic pro-growth syllogism presented as common sense: if capital is happy, workers will be, too.

The subtext lives in what’s missing. There’s no mention of wages, bargaining power, training, regional inequality, or the possibility that “best jobs” might require guardrails on business rather than gifts to it. “Best place in the world” is an intentionally competitive frame, implying a race in which other nations are threats and policy is a scoreboard. That superlative also smuggles in permission for sacrifices: lower taxes, lighter regulation, weaker labor protections, fewer constraints on corporate behavior, all justified as the price of winning.

Context matters: DeMint rose as a Tea Party-aligned conservative and later led the Heritage Foundation, a pipeline institution for market-first policy. In that ecosystem, “jobs” is often the moral language used to sell deregulation. The sentence works rhetorically because it fuses patriotism with policy preference; opposing it can be cast as opposing American competitiveness or employment itself.

It’s also strategic ambiguity. “Do business” can mean innovation and entrepreneurship, but it can just as easily mean a friendlier climate for outsourcing, consolidation, and precarious work. The quote doesn’t argue; it brands.