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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives.
According to fiscal year 2017 data, the most recent available, the South's share of the U.S. young adult population was 33 percent, but it provided 41 percent of new military enlistees nationwide. As a result, the region's representation ratio is 1.2, which means it provided 20 percent more military recruits than might be expected given its young adult population.
This is a factor of ten smaller of a difference than would justify the above comment. 90% southerners never serve in the military, and those that do serve only 20% more often than northerners. Calling them the 'warrior class' is absurd.
Or, you know, maybe the first numbers on Google are wrong. That's possible. (I skimmed the articles, they seem reasonable). But if you're going to make fiery moral pronouncements, maybe bring a number or two with it, so we can check if the claim is justified?
I'm curious if people who downvoted can explain why? I just don't think there's a significant material link between the South and America's modern "warrior class". Or was it tone? The third paragraph was intended to be self-deprecating and indicate my uncertainty.
I didn't downvote, don't know either.
I'm still fairly confident that Southern White men are integral to the strength of the US military. Total numbers are one thing, boots on the ground are another. The primary sacrifices in war (and the key to victory) comes from those who are doing the fighting. Military enlistees includes maintenance, catering, admin and so on which are all important but secondary to the primary combat function.
See an article complaining that there aren't enough Blacks in combat arms, meaning they can't be officers, meaning they can't get high-ranking command positions: https://mwi.usma.edu/strategic-problem-army-doesnt-seem-care-african-americans-arent-branching-combat-arms/
This article says that US casualties in Iraq were predominantly White Southern men from working class backgrounds: https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/10/30/iraq-war-casualties-mostly-white-working-class/
I think I'd maybe slightly disagree with that because occupations are fungible, but not really that strongly and I don't know much.
My much bigger disagreement is I don't understand why that undermines DBDr's original post. He's insulting the South for bad reasons, but (see math below) the south is like 9% "warrior" while the non-south is 6% "warrior", so it doesn't feel like the insults are motivated by, or really related to, that 'warrior class' aspect. And I think it's quite plausible (not true though) for the South to have significant negative cultural features while also providing 41% more of the military than you'd expect, and it'd reasonable to criticize those. If, hypothetically, the black community provided much more than its share of America's soldiers, I'd still support far-right statements about black culture because they're true!
Are they though? Are you ready to march off to war, not merely to some IT/intel-analysis job that befits our class but actual boots on the ground? I'm not.
What I'm trying to say is that the people he sneers at provide a useful service to the 'rich technocratic part of the country', who also have many serious flaws. They do things we don't want to, it's division of labour. A country is at its best when united, not divided.
Furthermore, OP didn't provide reasonable criticism. He's not saying 'and some, I suppose are good people'. He's saying that the South consists of unreconstructed (literally) traitors and some combination of proudly stupid hill people and pretentious faux-aristocratic hedonists. He's saying everything's really simple, that there's a broadly good North with some bad elements and a totally worthless South that needed/needs Forceful Correction. That's a gross and aggressive simplification. Imagine if I just valorised our special forces or the working class and demonized the elites like that, it would be a distortion. He even got modded, it was an egregious post.
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I didn't downvote you but here is my guess:
41 to 33 is closer to 1.24. This also means the non-South's share is lower, so the South is 41% more likely to serve, not 20%. (I just plugged (41/33)/((100-41)/(100-33)) into a calculator, I may have calculated incorrectly so someone correct me if I'm wrong). The disparity between north/south may be greater or lower since this is specifically non-south states, not north states. There is a chart in this article here that shows by state breakdown using 2018 data: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military. You can see the ratios go from 0.3 (Washington DC) to 1.5 (South Carolina).
Regarding what constitutes a "warrior class" that's a semantics argument, so people are in disagreement with you that you need a 200% difference to qualify the existence of a warrior class. You could cherry-pick specific states (e.g. Washington DC to South Carolina) and get a 400% difference in the ratio, though, but the 41% is probably close to the actual number.
It's also important to consider the culture and attitude surrounding the military, and not just who serves in the military. The military is more red-tribe-aligned than blue-tribe-aligned. I don't think it's unreasonable to see how people from a state like New York think about the military (disinterest to disdain) to people from Texas (generally supportive). Your average Southerner may not have been in the military, but they sure as hell are more likely to support it than your average Northerner. If there ever was a draft for a conflict I believe it's reasonable to assume Southerners will be more likely to support their country while the Northern people are likely to protest it. For example, if we look at protests during the Vietnam War, a disproportionate amount of protests came from northeastern states relative to their population, enrollment rates, and deaths from war. There are some other things to consider, such as why people join the military (is it pride for the country? Or because the military provides an opportunity for the economically disadvantaged?), or how long people serve, or how many people choose to stay in the reserve forces after active duty.
Essentially, I think the data point you brought up was simply inadequate to convince people that the South does not constitute more of the "warrior class" compared to the North. Furthermore, even if you were able to provide more facts/statistics, whether or not the South constitutes a "warrior class" is not relevant to the core argument of @RandomRanger's comment, which is regarding people's attitudes toward the military.
That being said, I personally would not downvote your post, as I think it adds an interesting point of discussion to consider, but people will vote however they want. I have seen similar sentiment recently regarding voting patterns here. I can't remember who but I saw someone with a flair that essentially said to comment if downvoting and nobody else put a reason why. It would be nice to get a response from someone who actually downvoted but the most likely explanation is they just didn't agree with what you said, and I suspect my points above would not be that different for why they didn't agree with what you said.
I think your 41% number is correct. And if half of the US population served in the military, then I'd be comfortable calling the South the warrior class informally. But since only 7% ever serve, I don't think that makes sense.
In particular, OP's inference was that people who insult the south are "sneering at our warrior class". To whatever extent the South has distinct cultural attributes from the rest of the US, I don't think it's reasonable to call criticism of that culture 'sneering at the warrior class'. Things like "Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension" aren't really true IMO, but they could be, and if they were I don't see what criticizing that has to do with sneering at a warrior class. The people he's criticizing are mostly not warriors! 9% of them are warriors, as opposed to 6% of the people he's not criticizing.
Like, Ranger's post just feels like a non-sequitur to me.
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