CYCLE OF DEMOCRACY: INEVITABLE OR JUST A WARNING?

By Bill Dunn

Scottish-born writer Alexander Tytler reportedly offered the following quotation in the mid-1700s:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.

“The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. The nations have progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith,
from spiritual faith to great courage,
from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency,
from dependency back to bondage.”

I use the word “reportedly” because there is a boisterous debate raging on the Internet over exactly who was the author of this quotation. Some insist it was indeed Mr. Tytler. Others say the true author was Arnold Toynbee…or maybe Lord Thomas Macauly…or maybe Benjamin Disraeli.

Snopes.com, the Web site that prides itself on debunking urban myths and uncovering the truth about rumors, declares this quote was written not by Tytler, but rather by someone named Lord Woodhouselee. However, Wikipedia, another Web site devoted to facts and figures—some of them occasionally accurate—claims that “Lord Woodhouselee” is an honorary title, which was held by, guess who, Alexander Tytler.

I find it curious that there are countless debates online regarding who authored this quote, but very few discussions about the content of the statement. Frankly, I don’t care if it was originally written by Mickey Mouse. What is important is whether or not there is any merit to the claims made in the quotation.

These are the issues I’d like to see discussed and debated:

• Is it historically true that democracies last an average of only 200 years? (Especially since ours is now 233 years old.)
   
• Is the sequence of situations listed in the quotation typical for democratic nations?
   
• Do people really vote for candidates who promise money from the public treasury? (OK, no discussion needed, as the most prominent feature of our political systems nowadays is the abundance of special interest groups that promise to deliver votes in exchange for huge gobs of other people’s money, in the form of entitlements, subsidies, earmarks, government jobs, etc.)
   
• If the sequence of situations is accurate, at which stage is the U.S. today? (I’d say apathy, on the verge of dependency.)
   
• At our current rate, how long before we complete the cycle and return to bondage?
   
• Does bondage mean overt slavery? Or can it also be more subtle, in the form of, say, a maze of government regulations and judicial amnesia regarding once-cherished Constitutional rights and freedoms?
   
• Most important of all, is the sequence of situations an inevitable cycle, or is there still time to revert back to the faith, courage, and liberty stages? And if so, how exactly do we do it?

These are the topics that ought to be discussed. But maybe a feature of the apathy stage is that people would rather quibble over minutiae instead of facing tough issues head-on. Maybe completing the cycle back to the bondage stage is inevitable for the United States. God, I hope not.