“A democracy is always temporary in nature”

I’m not making any predictions, but this quote attributed to 18th-century British lawyer Alexander Tytler about civilizational cycles is sobering:

“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 that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes 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. During those 200 years, these nations always 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 complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage.”

Whether it was Tytler or someone else, whether the 200-year cycle is accurate, or whether this assumption of historical determinism is valid, the words are a warning. Some of the steps are like Plato’s description of the movement from timarchy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Just exactly where we are in this sequence in the U.S. of today is an interesting speculation. Tax hikes, regulatory micromanagement and intrusion, the strong sense of entitlement to be cared for that increasing segments of society exhibit as a result of the welfare state, massive deficits as tax hikes and regulation throttle wealth creation and cannot pay for the welfare state, a currency under such stress it appears headed for debasement (initial steps already having been taken through the elimination of silver and gold as backstops for paper), class warfare rhetoric from a party whose lust for power caused it to lose its grip on sanity, lack of social “substance” and shared values (faith, morals) and an “anything goes” morality that undermine the private voluntary institutions that mediate between individuals and government and shield the former from the coercive excesses of the latter. The great German lawyer/political scientist/sociologist Max Weber had a similar view of the decline of individual freedom through the inevitable progression of the state into a bureaucratic mode that increasingly seeks to rationalize, and thereby control, life with a myriad of intrusive rules and regulations. There are no sure things in history, but the Obama agenda, looked at in light of these proposed axioms of historical movement, takes on a sinister cast.