[Dean's World] Dean: Stuff And Nonsense: "Why Democracies Fail"

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dean:
Stuff And Nonsense: "Why Democracies Fail"
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1141797681.shtml


   I recently received this in email:

     At about the time our original 13 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 prior:

     "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 over 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."

   This is one of those goodies that's been floating around the internet
   for decades, and some of it had its origins even before that.

   Now, aside from the fact that this is all a bunch of rubbish--which
   I'll get to in a minute--we have the startling fact that no one named
   Alexander Tyler (or Tytler) ever wrote those words and, compounding
   things further, this is not one quotation but two completely separate
   quotations--both of them from anonymous and almost certainly unrelated
   authors. If you want a pretty good and thorough look at the origins of
   these two anonymous, unattributed quotations, try [1]this attempted
   tracing by Loren Collins. This is not one but two quotes, both of them
   from completely anonymous sources.

   More to the point, however, both quotes may sound wise but they're
   both utter horse manure. To the second quote, about the supposed
   sequence great civilizations go through: Pah! You can only believe
   that rubbish if you haven't read much of any history of the rise and
   fall of many civilizations. It's probably fair to say that apathy,
   complacency, and corruption are common in failing civilizations, but
   it's also the case that these are often overcome. This claim is false
   on its face.

   Far more seductive is the claim that democracy can only stand until
   the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the
   public treasury. That on its face sounds like it could be true--but it
   isn't true, and all you have to do is think about it hard for about
   five minutes to know that it's a steaming crock of poop. The vast
   majority of Western democracies have never followed this path. Even in
   the generous welfare state systems of Europe, voters have consistently
   shown that they believe people should work for a living, and pay
   taxes, and that they can only expect so much from their taxes. And in
   the United States especially, the voters in the 1990s showed that they
   were willing to put time limits and work requirements on welfare
   beneficiaries, and to this day the vast majority of Americans look
   down on those who live in permanent dependence on state assistance.

   In short, nothing about either of these misattributed, anonymous
   quotes makes any real sense. As wise as they sound, they're both
   nonsense.

References

   1. http://www.geocities.com/nerolsnilloc/library/tytler.html