Politics & Power Quote by John Linder

Linder is trying to do two political tricks at once: flatter a home audience while laundering a contested foreign-policy agenda through the warm glow of national myth. By calling contemporary actors "patriots" and slotting them into a "long line", he turns the messy present into an inheritance story. Continuity is the selling point. If todays actions are simply the next link in the chain, then questioning them starts to look like disrespecting the founders, or at least opting out of the civic family.

The key move is the universalizing language: "liberty and freedom around the world". Those are unassailable nouns, deliberately broad and historically elastic. They can mean diplomacy, aid, sanctions, covert action, or war. The vagueness is strategic; it invites agreement without naming the costs. It also smuggles in an assumption that American power is inherently emancipatory, that the nation exports freedom the way it exports culture: with a net positive moral balance.

Context matters because this line comes from a politician of Linder's generation, shaped by Cold War rhetoric where "freedom" functioned as both ideal and justification. In that tradition, domestic unity is manufactured through an external mission. The subtext is less about the world than about us: we are still the good guys, our institutions are still righteous, and our interventions - whatever form they take - should be read as moral duty rather than geopolitical choice.

It works because it offers absolution. If promoting liberty is tradition, then complexity becomes heresy, and skepticism can be recast as betrayal.