Having worked alongside cops and military for a number of years, I want to be quick to point out that I respect them as well as empathize with them.  But there is a paradox in their work:

Although they do more adventurous things than most people, there is also an element of almost womblike sheltering to their environment.  Particularly for junior members of the military, with their needs for food, clothing, and shelter all provided by the government, it is almost as if they hadn’t really entered full adulthood.

As they stay in their jobs, they tend to become more familiar with the bureaucracy and organizational politics that pervade any large organization.  But the longer they stay in, and the more they become disaffected by these negative factors, the more they come under the pull of a different kind of force at the opposite end of the timeline.  With excellent retirement benefits awaiting them at an age that is still quite young, many feel it would be foolhardy to risk a pension jumping into the sea of uncertainties of another occupation.

In my experience, caution hasn't stopped many of them from dreaming about launching second careers once they reach this point.  In fact, the more frustrating the government bureaucracy they have to cope with in their daily lives becomes, the more they may come to see a second career in the business world as the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel.”

In the meantime, they encounter nothing of the corporate world but its bright, efficient, meritocratic public face, because they have never been exposed to all the frustrating bureaucracy and organizational politics that the rest of us working stuffs “on the inside” have to put up with.

The net result is that for them, government and the public sector can come to be seen as the source of everything that is wrong with the world, while business and the private sector end up being seen as the bringers of all goodness and light.

The imbalance of this experience cannot help but render them extraordinarily receptive to conservative political messages.