Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
– Ronald Reagan
These words of Ronald Reagan have inspired me for many years and while I agree that the freedom we enjoy must be guarded carefully and defended with all of our might (between Jonn, TSO and I we have over 50 years doing just that) there still exists a theory that all democracies are cyclic and doomed from the onset.
I received this today from a Freeper:
How Long Do We Have?
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.’
‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.’
‘From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’
‘The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years’
Not sure where the 200 years come from. The Romans and Greeks and Egyptians and Aztecs and Persians (you get the point) all had much longer runs as “civilizations”. Perhaps the issue is the length of time that these civilizations were democracies or republics? That makes more sense as each of these civilizations’ owed most of its history to monarchs or dictatorships.
Further Tyler offered a predictable cycle of the downfall of these civilizations:
‘During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage’
I do not disagree with the cycle but I don’t think it’s necessarily inevitable or irreversible.
By the height of the FDR administration, America was leaning closer to Socialism than anytime in its history. FDR did effectively inject government into almost every walk of American life but died before he could realize true Socialism.
Truman and Eisenhower saw the dangerous link between statism and their mortal enemy Communism and as a result a great deal of FDR’s socialist programs fell by the side.
In spite of the recent re-emergence of the joys of Camelot, the truth is that Kennedy was a totally ineffective chief executive and the only thing that secured his beloved place in history was a magic bullet in Dallas. In fact, had that bullet not found the young president, the next great leap toward Socialism may never have happened…the Johnson Administration.
A couple of weak Republicans and an embarrassment of a Democrat were rescued by Reagan.
The cycle is still valid however.
As a capitalist society and given the recent government intervention in markets and the likelihood of far more intervention under a leftist president and congress, where do you see us in the cycle?
I think we are solidly in stage 7 at this point.