Militarism: Republics' Bane
There are numerous advantages to republican systems, however, they have never proved more peaceable than dictatorships or monarchies, maybe even less so. Renaissance Italy saw unending strife amongst her city-state republics. While Rome, and its modern US successor, militarily created two of history's greatest empires. In the end, Rome's militarism turned inward, bringing down the republic. Today, historical warnings blindingly flash across the American republic.
Both Rome and the US started as small settlements on their respective coasts. Over four centuries, the Roman republic spread across the entire Mediterranean. In two and half centuries, the US moved across the globe. Domestically, the growth and success of their respective militaries fundamentally altered their economies and politics. Even more so when both republics lost their greatest foes; Rome with the defeat of Carthage, the US with the Soviets walking off the field.
After Carthage's fall, Rome's citizen army gradually turned into a professional caste comprised of former small farmers, whose families lost their land to increasingly massive plantations run by a few patricians and slave labor. For many, the army became the only economic option. Over a century's time, this changed Rome completely. In his excellent, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero sums up the problems of the republic's final decades,
“There is the contradiction between the sentiment of democracy and the unequal distribution of wealth; between elective institutions and the political indifference of the upper and middle classes; and lastly between the weakening of the military spirit and the heightening of the national pride, between ambitious dreams of war and conquest and the distaste among all classes for active fighting.”
Written a century ago, it’s a pretty close portrayal of contemporary United States, especially the citizenry's lack of will to in anyway be burdened for what might be deemed a greater public good. At sporting events, a befuddled national pride reveals itself most glaringly with an out of shape and overweight populous competing to stand straightest for the martial strains of their national anthem accompanied by assorted military displays.
By conquest, Rome's military provided ever greater wealth to an increasingly select minority. Military wealth creation in the 21st century is in many ways a different affair. Costs of occupation increasingly outweigh economic benefits, as most recently experienced in America's ill-conceived efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In recent US military excursions, on the ground soldiers reap little benefit, the great profit in today's American militarism is producing armaments and supplies, in what President Dwight D. Eisenhower labeled, “the military industrial complex.” Profit is not in conquering, but gained through perpetual military expenditures. In order to continue this obscene spending and profiteering, new and old enemies must be continually conjured.
In Rome, the nonstop militarism of four centuries gradually turned inward. The republic's last four decades saw a series of military leaders march on Rome, destroying its people and institutions, leading to the establishment of one man rule – the Princeps, or as he came to be known across history, “Emperor.” This change is succinctly described by the 19th century's greatest Roman historian, Theodor Mommsen. In his, A History of Rome, he writes of the republic's last decades demise and the empire's installment, “The regime of aristocrats and bankers in the state were overthrown, only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth continued as before to be tyrannized and worked for profit by a privileged minority.”
This path is known to all familiar with republican history, including the founding generation of the United States. James Madison, principle architect of the US constitution wrote,
“It deserves to be well considered also, that actual war is not the only state which may supply the means of usurpation. The real or pretended apprehensions of it, are, sometimes of equal avail to the projects of ambition. Hence the propagation and management of alarms grows into a kind of system. Its origin however is not of recent or even moderate date. The Roman Senate and the Athenian demagogues understood it as well.”
The American National Security State's alarm system is well established, an endless, sickening repetition.