Politics & Power Quote by Rob Simmons

A complaint about geography masquerading as a warning about democracy. Rob Simmons frames the loss of military bases in the Northeast not just as an economic or strategic shift, but as a cultural rupture: if the armed forces aren’t physically present in a region, the public’s emotional investment withers. The line works because it treats proximity as patriotism. Bases aren’t only infrastructure; they’re rituals of visibility - jets overhead, uniforms in town, family members employed on-post. Remove that, and the military becomes an abstraction you praise on holidays and forget at budget time.

The subtext is a political argument about who bears the burden of war. “A nation of citizen soldiers” reaches back to the American mythology of the farmer-soldier: ordinary people who fight, then return to ordinary life. Simmons is implicitly uneasy with a professionalized force that’s culturally siloed - drawn disproportionately from certain regions and classes, fought by a few while the many watch from a distance. Base closures accelerate that siloing by literally relocating the military footprint away from dense, influential population centers.

Context matters: post-Cold War realignment and BRAC-era closures shifted installations toward the Sun Belt and away from older industrial corridors. Simmons’ Northeastern alarm is also a bid for relevance: if your region stops hosting the military, it risks losing not only jobs but voice - fewer stakeholders, fewer representatives with skin in the game, fewer civilians who personally know what deployments cost. The quote is less nostalgia than a warning about civic detachment becoming policy.