Leadership Quote by John Linder

Patriotism here is doing a very specific kind of work: it’s widening the frame until disagreement feels small, even impolite. Linder’s sentence reads like a ceremonial add-on, the kind of line that can be dropped into almost any speech, but that interchangeability is the point. By asking “Let us also reflect,” he turns a contested set of wars into an occasion for collective reverence, shifting the audience from citizens with opinions to participants in a civic ritual.

The key move is the careful separation of “service” from “policy.” “Honorable service” sanctifies the individual soldier while leaving the underlying mission unexamined. That’s not accidental. During the Iraq and Afghanistan years, politicians routinely used praise for troops as political insulation: it preempted charges of disrespect and made criticism of strategy easier to recast as criticism of people. The language performs unity without requiring consensus.

Notice the geographic sweep: “overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, and around the world.” It simultaneously acknowledges the two dominant theaters of the era and normalizes a global military footprint as routine, even self-evident. “Currently serving” adds immediacy, implying ongoing sacrifice that demands present-tense deference.

The subtext is less about those service members than about the speaker and the audience: We are the kind of nation that pauses to honor them; we are on the right side of duty. In that sense, the line is a political shibboleth - a signal of belonging in a post-9/11 public culture where gratitude is expected, and skepticism must first pay a toll.