Posted on 11/21/2007 5:52:53 PM PST by oldbrowser
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'
'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'
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamlin University School of Law, S t. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Gore: 19 Bush: 29
Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000 Bush: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million Bush: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2 Bush: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United State s is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase.
If these numbers are accurate, it says allot about Counties that are predominantly democrat.
Yes, eventually we will have our Gais Marius and then our Lucius Cornelius Sulla and all that was known and traditional will be broken. The next generations will flop in the wind until somebody(Gais Julius Caesar) comes along to forge anew of which that was broken.
yitbos
Wasn't it originally set up where only landowners could vote? I think there was a reason for that.
It will not be the mob, but a demagogue that will step on the mob’s back(dead or a live) to attain power. People stand in the way and try to frustrate this rise to power resulting in the demagogue feeling slighted and denied what they feel is rightfully theirs. Look to how Marius(known as a populist, a New Man that reeked of hatred for the old guard) rose to power by reorganizing the Legions to take in the non propertied and then using his legislative lackeys to give away state land to the landless veterans. These veterans were bought and paid for by these handouts and voted Marius Consul seven times. He was actually denied the seventh time and then hired a mob to invade Roma and take it over. This came about because the small farmer that made up the Legions had mostly been killed off in mismanaged wars that resulted in the families selling the property to make ends meet. The ones buying the property were the 1st order(Senators, Merchants and other wealthy property owners).
The only people left to flesh out the Legions were not only the non propertied, but of the lowest order of Roman of the Romans. On the other side was Sulla (who was of old patrician family stock) who stood for tradition and the way things were, went to far in his restoring of the Republic. He went the opposite extreme that his former mentor Marius did and thus destroying what people knew to be normal and right. In the aftermath what was left of the 1st order were either neo-conservatives retroing what they thought was the old ways that had been lost and others that were muddling along to survive. That set the stage for Marius and Sulla’s nephew Caesar to blaze a new path, a new Roma. As Caesar felt that a Republic was inadequate to manage the Empire Roma found itself in possession of.
You will notice that we are playing along this same path, just a blazing speed. Per Aristotle, Monarchy then Republic, Republic then Democracy/Demagoguery, Democracy then Dictatorship and then rinse and repeat. America, Monarchy to Republic, Republic to Democracy? Are we there, yet?
If you want to save your precious Republic than save the middle class. I don’t middle class based on the materialistic value of paper money in one’s bank account. But those that are artisans that have sought after skills and products, business owners and of course the small/mid size land owner. There will always be an aristocracy, but this delves into dictatorship when the aristocracy owns everything.
Just wait till the newly retired baby boomers start voting themselves better prescription drug benefits and increased social security payments. Younger people won't have the numbers to counteract this.
This goes to show that history does not repeat. Also, political prophets have been out to lunch all along.
I’ve often had a good laugh about this. The Athenian republic didn’t last very long, and in one of its incarnations (the famous one) fell under the spell of Pericles, who won power like so:
“All kinds of enterprises should be created which will provide an inspiration for every art, find employment for every hand... we must devote ourselves to acquiring things that will be the source of everlasting fame.”
So they spent twenty years and a staggering sum of money building the Parthenon, then got themselves started on a war with Sparta, during which time Athens was shuttered and cluttered and a bunch of people (including Pericles) died of some kind of epidemic (wouldn’t surprise me to learn it was typhus, but really could have been almost anything); not satisfied with that, the Athenian mobocracy launched an invasion of Sicily, with a view to conquering Syracuse, and lost nearly every ship and soldier sent there.
Years earlier, Themistocles had talked the Athenians into using their newfound wealth (from a large strike of silver, in a mine which finally closed in the 19th or 20th century AD) to build a fleet of ships, which came in handy when he had to devise the defense of the city (and actually, all of Greece) and came up with a couple of clever ruses and ultimately, a massive victory against the Persian navy at Salamis.
Sidebar: there’s a too-short article by Victor Davis Hanson in Military History Quarterly about some recently recovered fragments of Hyperides, an ancient Greek politician / orator. Some of the fragments discuss Salamis and other Persian War -era battles.
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/mhq
Chavez was freely elected. Now, he’s going to be their dictator, unless the poeple there, do something about it. And not like the people there, can count on the UN, a body that was supposed to handle that kind of thing. Freely elected, then he stole the freedome to have him removed from office. Amazing, and people think “it can’t happen here”.
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It's almost like a law of nature. The important thing to remember is that there is always people waiting in the wings for a society to let it's guard down. Once this happens, a tyrant takes over with false promises.
And then, people realize why gun control ideas were stupid, and that the media was not to inform, but mislead.
Wasn’t it originally set up where only landowners could vote? I think there was a reason for that.
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I believe it was originaly only MALES who owned at least $200. in property (a sizable sum at the time) and who could demonstrate an ability to read, write and understand the Constitution. And yes, there was a good reason for all that!
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