The Trans Movement Just Hit Home.......

[Dill]

(05-12-2023, 08:53 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: There's a reason that our military budget is astronomical, and that reason is because the US is "expected" to be the protectors of the free world.  We are now in a period where the armed forces are struggling and in some instances failing to meet recruiting numbers.  We live in a country so comfortable that our young are not willing to sign up to defend, that is a warning signal.  That in itself isn't the barometer of failure that I'm leaning toward as much as our youth are more caught up in social issues that they no longer care about being a part of keeping those rights to do so sovereign.  

Your failure to recognize that the US is currently in a parallel situation as Rome under the rule of Caligula, is just baffling to me.

Our military budget is far and away the largest in the world--triple China's. 

Pally is correct about military "pork" expanding our military budget. 

But you are also right that our budget is large because the U.S. is "expected" to be protectors of the free world.

Ideally the goal is to protect the liberal international order, in part for our own and our allies prosperity, and in part to prevent another world war.  People should expect this of the U.S. if they want social and economic progress to continue, though "lead policeman" is probably a better term than "protector."

But we are also an advanced capitalist country, whose economy is driven by expanding consumption. That's why we have so many young people interested in i-phones and video games, with little idea of the world beyond their immediate community if it falls outside pop music and movies and sports. We are also a LIBERAL democracy which means people have a lot of leeway for exploring ("consuming"?) desires, identities and sexual orientations. And because our government has functioned so well by historical standards, people assume their prosperity is just natural, not a consequence of good government, so their political choices don't matter all that much. And democracy needs no defending from INTERNAL as well as external threats. We are long ways from WWII when the population shared the burden of rationing and finally understood the danger of "America first" isolationism. Now a temporary mask mandate during a pandemic is received as an attack on our "freedom" and a major step towards dictatorship, while some think re-electing an autocrat will restore "freedom." That means our conception of "freedom" and what actually threatens it has changed. 

Is there a fall-of-Rome analogy here? Caligula was actually an effective and well liked emperor for his first few years; but the empire had no effective legal way of removing bad emperors, in this case one whose malignant narcissism eventually dominated his behavior. Maybe there is a comparison between some emperors and some of our politicians, though probably not with the Rome as a state.

The Republic was dead 70 years before Caligula, and the Western empire continued for another four centuries after him. One could make an analogy between Trump and Caligula, as both were quite unhinged and played to cheering crowds as they publicly humiliated people in their own government.*  I admit it does not bode well for our Republic that Trump's violations of our civic ideals and laws elicit cheers and millions of votes. But unlike Romans under the empire, we still have functioning elections--though, unfortunately, many of our voters have lost interest in the kind of history that might clarify current politics and guide that voting. (I want to say our educators are to blame, but then I remember that in the U.S. public schools and curricula are often controlled by people who have never actually taught the subjects affected by their policies. Curricular choices are removed from teachers.)

The Cincinnatus ideal of the farmer soldier, who went to war for the public good and then returned to his farm with no interest in holding power, was also dead by Caligula's time, killed by the takeover of family farms by large estates and the turn to slave labor to farm it. Also killed by military reforms which left soldiers beholden to rich generals who could afford to buy their loyalty. Maybe that is a comparison to the present, though the actual "fall" didn't come until centuries later. (Not that rich generals buy soldiers loyalty, but that civic duty stopped being a motivation for military service and was replaced by incentives to private gain.)
 
*Lol my favorite--C has his horse, Incitatus, declared a senator and proposed him for a Consulship and eventually deified him. Once he supposedly ordered senators to eat his horse's manure. If they didn't, they were punished for rejecting the horse's divine body. (A history professor told me that, but I've never found the source.) All this was perhaps less craziness than an effort to de-legitimate the Senate in the eyes of the Roman mob. Caligula also gave people around him insulting nicknames, like "Priapus" for the effeminate head of the Praetorian Guard. Easy to imagine him calling senators "crooked Cassius" or "little Lepidus" or "sanctimonious Silva" as he insisted they pay court to Incitatus.