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Spartans were fearsome warriors but actually deliberated with great care about starting a major conflict, probably because they understood the real cost of war. By contrast, neoconservatives are eager to start wars they won't fight and naturally don't care if they don't end.
Probably one of the best parts of the Trump era has been highlighting how insane and irresponsible our military machine is, with it being so eager to go to war without any real objectives but to go to war 2/
And they do this by playing on a bastardized casual militarism. "You don't want to indiscriminately bomb other countries, what, DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?" They pretend to be Spartans, basically 3/
A lot of the blame is on the Bush family for playing on people's patriotism to do incredibly irresponsible things. It's not just "Democrats like Jim Mattis." Republicans have been among the absolute worst of them, and still are 4/
It should be a focused project of the right to show people who the ruling class, Republicans and Democrats, exploit patriotism to profit from war while irresponsibly sending our very best to fight and die, and to be forgotten about when they come home 5/
It's not that war is bad, it's that dumb wars in the service of ulterior things is bad. Conservatives have failed to make that distinction 6/
Again, going back to the Spartans: they would deliberate about entering a conflict, have set objectives, accomplish them, and be done. But they didn't have defense contractors to encourage them to linger around the battlefield... 7/
It's worth reading the Peloponnesian War and looking at Archidamus' speech to see how cautious he was about war, as the king of the Spartans, because he knew there was so much at stake. And compare that to the semi-sentient chest beating from our warhawks 8/
Inb4 a Straussian comes at me with praise for Athens over Sparta 9/
