Politics & Power Quote by John McHugh

The anxiety here isn’t about troop levels; it’s about social glue. McHugh is pointing to an America where military service has become a niche experience rather than a shared civic rite, and he’s warning that distance changes the terms of consent. When only a sliver of the population serves, the wars still happen, the budgets still pass, the flag still waves, but the lived cost gets outsourced to a smaller, often geographically and economically concentrated group.

“Voluntary military” sounds like freedom, but the subtext is a quiet trade: autonomy for the nation, isolation for the institution. A draft-era military forced contact between neighborhoods and bases, between political decisions and family dinner tables. An all-volunteer force can be highly professional and effective, yet it also makes it easier for civilians to treat conflict like background noise. If no one you know is deploying, it’s simpler to support endless engagements in the abstract, or to ignore them entirely.

McHugh’s language - “tenuous,” “less personal” - is deliberately tactile. He’s naming a loss of intimacy: fewer shared references, fewer cross-class friendships, fewer veterans in workplaces and local offices who can puncture slogans with experience. In the post-9/11 era especially, “support the troops” became a moral posture that often substituted for civic scrutiny. His intent is less nostalgia than warning: when the military becomes a separate caste, democracy’s feedback loop weakens, and the decision to use force gets politically cheaper.