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naraburns  nihil supernum  19d ago (text post)   26910 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Then I disagree that the republican system was designed to select for that. I think its biggest issue was that it was simply unsuited to managing an empire. Proconsularship was a band-aid that ruined the concept of "one consul - one term". If you could spend a year managing a province as a consul and then another year as a proconsul, then extending the term for a third year started to sound plausible. This made a proconsular appointment much more attractive than a regular consularship.

Why do you disagree that they selected for it? The link is undeniable. Especially because consular appointments are annual, and it's very hard to judge the wider decisions or impact of a consul on that time scale, and conquest is one of the lone things that's obviously an immense positive, just like rhetoric, except proconsular appointments shatter that dynamic and form an even greater imbalance of power. If we're not selecting for great orators or great generals, then what are we selecting for?

Power-hungry politicians. A simply great general would have been content with triumphs and adoration. Someone like Pompey or Caesar viewed conquest as a stepping stone towards their main goal: political domination.

Right, but if the main road to political domination is military genius, the selection pressure falls on tactical brilliance.

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