Where in the civilization historical cycle is the USA?

You’ve probably seen this quote, incorrectly attributed to someone named Alexander Tyler, floating around the Internet mail queues. Even snoops has a page dedicated to the e-mail that goes around comparing statistics between the Clinton and Bush years and more recently Bush versus Obama.

I’m not interested in rehashing those numbers – not noted here – but would like to put out the part of the e-mail concerning the historical cycle of a democracy. We’re technically a democratic republic, but what say you about this…

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse 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 a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

You can find more about this jumble of quotes here. I’m not stating this is the cycle of all democracies or democratic republics (I have not done the research), but this is the additional quote you frequently see with this e-mail.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence…

Just putting it out there for discussion…

[poll id=”150″]

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Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

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