Politics & Power Quote by Steve Buyer

By foregrounding "ordinary American men and women", Steve Buyer wraps national power in the moral authority of the unglamorous and the local. The phrase "communities large and small" is doing quiet political work: it dissolves class, region, and party into one clean civic portrait, then asks the listener to honor that portrait with agreement. Buyer doesn’t name a war, a draft, or a policy; he names a type of person. That’s the pivot. The argument isn’t built on outcomes, but on reverence.

The line "often before they were past their teenage years" tightens the emotional vise. It evokes enlistment at 18, the sudden adulthood of military life, and the unsettling truth that a democracy routinely asks its youngest citizens to absorb risks older citizens debate in safety. That detail functions as moral leverage: if teenagers paid, who gets to question the bill?

"Unprecedented freedoms" and "world's bulwark of liberty" expands the claim from gratitude to destiny. It’s a classic American rhetorical escalation: local sacrifice becomes global architecture. Subtextually, it frames U.S. military service as not merely defensive but civilizational, implying that skepticism about intervention, budgets, or strategy edges toward ingratitude or even complicity with tyranny.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in late-20th/early-21st-century political language that sacralizes the volunteer military, especially in the post-9/11 era. The intent is less to narrate history than to establish a hierarchy of credibility: the nation speaks most legitimately through those who served young, and the nation’s actions abroad inherit that legitimacy by association.