Politics & Power Quote by Robin Hayes

Hayes reaches for the most durable civic talisman in American politics: the oath. By enumerating every branch, he performs inclusivity as credibility, turning a broad constituency into a single moral bloc. The sentence is built to feel like a roll call at a memorial service, but its real engine is the pivot from "served" to "continue to serve". That move quietly recruits the past into the present, suggesting that gratitude is not a seasonal ritual but a standing obligation.

The choice to foreground the Constitution rather than a flag or a commander-in-chief matters. It frames military service as loyalty to an idea and a document, not to any particular administration. That sounds nonpartisan, almost antiseptic, yet the phrase "enemies foreign and domestic" smuggles in political electricity. Historically, it's oath language meant to signal vigilance against infiltration and subversion. In contemporary hands, "domestic" is the slippery word: it can mean terrorists, extremists, insurgents, protest movements, bureaucrats, "the other party", even critics of the military itself. The line invites listeners to map their own anxieties onto the oath without Hayes having to name a target.

"We can never forget" is less memory than instruction. It positions reverence as a civic litmus test: to disagree with the implied agenda is to risk being cast as forgetful, ungrateful, outside the national "we". The intent is clear: sanctify military service, yoke it to constitutional patriotism, and claim the moral high ground where political argument gets harder to start.