It is said that just over 200 years ago, Professor Alexander
Tytler wrote:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It
can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves a generous gift from the public treasury. From that
moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising
the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a
democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest
civilizations has been 200 years …
As is the case with many historic quotations, it has been
disputed that Tytler used these exact words. However, he certainly
said similar things, and in any case the authorship of the
quotation has little to do with its validity.
The tendency to turn elections into an auction of promises to be
paid for from the public treasury has been growing steadily for a
long time — some would say at least since the birth of modern
democracy in the late 18th century — that is, since a little more
than 200 years ago.
The 2012 U.S. presidential election, however, might be said to
be the first fought almost purely in accord with Tytler’s
predictions. The victor hardly paid even lip-service to the
problems of repaying public debt now grown to a literally
incomprehensible sum. It was also highly significant, though it has
not been politically-correct to mention the fact, that Obama’s vote
came from, as well as socialists of various stripes, the least
educated demographics.
Look further afield. The situation in Greece and other European
countries provided a pointer — major and continuing rioting in
protests against imposing even slight measures of fiscal
discipline. Greece is America a few years on.
We have only seen one major instance of national bankruptcy in a
large swathe of the developed world in relatively recent times: in
Britain and Europe in the aftermath of World War II.
The greatest differences between then and now were that then the
White Knight of the U.S. came forward with the Marshall Plan, and
Germany, the economic and industrial heart of Europe, though
greatly damaged by war and Nazism, still had a “tough” population
— used to hard work, austerity and sacrifice. To varying degrees,
so did the rest of Europe.
I have seen a photograph which I unfortunately did not keep
record of: it was taken somewhere in Germany in about 1946.
It is a night-scene showing a vast factory, bombed, roofless,
ruined, and dark: but not entirely dark. In one small corner of all
that devastation a light is burning and a lathe is turning.
Here is another illustration of a national characteristic of
toughness: 10 days after the end of the war in Europe, the Berlin
underground was running again; the London underground was on
strike.
The recent and on-going strikes and riots in Greece, at a time
when strikes and riots are plainly a form of national suicide, have
been in protest against the smallest proposed cuts in various
entitlements. Whatever happened to the fierce and almost legendary
Greek national pride and the toughness that enabled them to rout
Mussolini’s fascist legions? And recently there were the London and
other British riots, with broadly similar causes — slight and
hesitant measures in the direction of government austerity,
minuscule reductions in the size of the welfare state.
All coming, as Tytler is said to have predicted, roughly 200
years after the coming of parliamentary democracy. The great
English Reform Bill, the Representation of the People Act, which
greatly expanded the franchise, was passed in 1832.
America has been a by-word for ruggedness. Independence was seen
as a national characteristic. This has been the first presidential
election in which the successful candidate has appealed more or
less exclusively to hedonism, ease, softness and entitlement. Plans
for repaying, or even holding in check, the monstrous national debt
were, relatively speaking, hardly raised or analyzed. It was
actually highly significant that the Democrats dwelt on Big Bird as
an election icon.
I do not recall a single instance of Obama being asked the
simple question: “How do you propose to reduce the debt?” The
“tough” but essential questions: national defense, the size of the
nuclear strike-force, the state and future of anti-missile
defenses, were all similarly ignored. Benghazi proved either
desperate incompetence or active anti-Americanism on the
President’s part. It was part of the general softness and hedonism
of this almost pure Tytlerian election that Benghazi was barely
mentioned by Romney in the presidential debates, and when it was,
Obama was able to fob him off with a blatant lie. Romney should
have kept the debates riveted on Benghazi, the unmentioned gutting
of U.S. nuclear forces and the debt. Did anyone mention that China
can now put men in Space and America can’t? The ease with which
Obama was able to deflect the debate from such issues was
horrifying.
Even the desperately urgent questions of national energy
policies were brushed over fleetingly in the debates. To get a
detailed examination of them, one had to turn to little-read,
specialist papers.
What I call the “Tytlerization” of American politics (like
“Orwellian,” a word its author would not have wanted his name
hi-jacked for) has with this election become nearly total. Although
conservatives should remember nothing in politics is irreversible,
I cannot see that America is facing anything but economic
catastrophe.
