[Morromist]

One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.

I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.

[jsomedon]

IIRC, the samurai class after Meiji reform period kinda fall into this category, they eventually emerge into Yakuza.

[mitthrowaway2]

I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.

[RobotToaster]

Sparta, their entire civilization basically atrophied because of it.

[Aerolfos]

Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

[usrnm]

Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.

[altmanaltman]

Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.

[lukan]

70-85% of the spartan population were slaves. It takes a very brutal approach to keep things that way, so yes, 300 was rather not so much about the general concept of political freedom. Only about the freedom of one class to keep being slave masters and not also become subordinate to a new master on top.

[throwiudjd]

No, it was because of the low fertility rate. Most powerful class in Sparta were rich widows, even kings had to borrow money from them.

[jmyeet]

Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.

The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.

The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.

Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.

In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.

Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.

Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.

For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.

Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization

[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.

So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.

[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999

[cge]

>For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

To be a bit pedantic, you're combining two different senses of 'white' there: in the US, being culturally considered white by others was distinct from being legally considered white by the government, because from the Naturalization Act of 1790 onward, naturalization was legally limited to "free white persons" (subject to some later modifications, though "free white person" remained a category). From a legal perspective, the Irish (and Germans) were always considered white, and there was never any question (if I recall correctly, for Mexicans, there was at some time advice that legal whiteness should actually be determined based directly on skin color). From a cultural perspective, views could of course be more varied, and there's the complexity that views and discrimination could certainly be based on factors other than seeing people as white or non-white, even at a racial level for the types of people who made distinctions within whiteness. And of course, cultural views remain varied: I've been around some very waspy wasps in the US who, knowing my Greek name, probably didn't consider me to be entirely white.

By the time of the case you cite, the legal question more broadly had become a mess of different and sometimes contradictory decisions, in part because, when it actually needed to be litigated, 'scientific racism' and 'common knowledge' could go in very different directions, as one might expect from something so arbitrary and contrived. Dow was decided on scientific racism lines, and made some Arabs white (particularly Syrians), though there were later cases with the opposite determination, in part because Dow was just Fourth Circuit, but also at times including arguments like 'from a place not bordering the Mediterranean'. Thind, on the other hand, was determined on common knowledge lines, and can bizarrely be summarized as 'being Aryan and very racist does not make a person white' (the entire set of pre-Thind cases around Indians, actually, often have wild and arbitrary decisions; I recall that one lower court decision could be summarized as 'this scientific argument seems dubious, but the guy seems like an upstanding character, so it seems fair to say he's white').

[throwiudjd]

Sounds like current US. Military industrial complex just starts wars randomly, and does not bother with approval from senate.

[otherme123]

I live in a country that was ruled by the military many times in the past, and the US never looked to me under treat of a military coup.

In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, ultimately it ends up being decided who the military is backing. Look at Spain, initially overtaken by a military coup. Then after Franco's death, as the transition to full blown democracy was already happening, sometime in the 80s (23-F), right as the successor to Suárez was about to take place, the military attempted another coup, but this time the military was on the people's democracy side, and basically saved democracy that day.

Really a hit or miss concept, military coups.

[Spooky23]

We had a coup attempt without military intervention on 1/6. The current regime is actively purging the military leadership.

Countries don’t have military coups or juntas because they are fundamentally bad or whatever. It happens becuase controls and civil authority is too weak, and we are in a cycle where the US is dismantling all controls and adopting a position of unlimited executive power. So it’s a matter of “when” some general intervenes. Either at the behest of someone or to save the republic.

You don’t really need a lot of people. Maybe a battalion or two.

[BirAdam]

In the USA, there was never a need for a military coup. After the Spanish-American war, the MIC was so wealthy that they simply bought influence. A few million handed to influential politicians is far cheaper than a coup.

The USA has the best government that money can buy.

[vasco]

See any military junta or dictatorship.