STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 11 October 2012

[Demeter]

17. The "Tytler" Insult -- Is Democracy Hopeless?

I WOULDN'T KNOW--IT'S NEVER BEEN TRIED

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-tytler-insult-is-democracy-hopeless.html

Well... it's back. One of the best examples of a mass-hypnotic pseudo-wisdom that helps to lobotomize politics in American life.

"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 largesse 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."

This widely-circulated nostrum is called the "Tytler Calumny" and it is the great example of what has gone wrong with the mental processes of our friends on the right, who used to be represented in sage debate by great minds like Barry Goldwater and Friedrich Hayek and William F. Buckley... but who are now reduced to slinging around aphorisms and fact-free fox-assertions. (In fairness, after watching Bill O'Reilly hold his own with Jon Stewart in the great 2012 Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium, I have to admit, there are still islands of sort-of almost Goldwater-style adult-honesty on that side, though lamentably rare, as this missive will show you.)

First off, although named for a 19th Century Englishman Alexander Tytler, there is no actual evidence that Tytler actually said it! This aphorism is also often attributed falsely to historian Arnold Toynbee or Lord Thomas Macauley, or even Alexis de Tocqueville, although recent scholarship appears to follow a trail leading to a 1943 speech by one Henning Webb Prentis, Jr., President of the Armstrong Cork Company.

It is often accompanied by another feat of cynicism called the Fatal Sequence:

"Great nations rise and fall in a 200 year cycle. 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."

...And indeed, there certainly are some patterns! Such as the dominance, in 99% of human societies, of small cabals of owner oligarchs, who passed on their property-based power to sons who never did a thing to earn it. The persistent-feudal pattern that Adam Smith and the American Founders strove so hard to break. Yes, I see the pattern-seeking allure. But I've learned to be wary of glib nostrums that seem just too convenient to be true. Consider how the Tytler Calumny appeals to the vanity of the one repeating it. The sad cynicism of someone who considers himself above the hoi polloi of the mere "people." It is a blithe dismissal of even the possibility that a democracy can maintain itself. This despite the fact that -- if you include the vigorous colonial legislatures -- we in the U.S. have three centuries of ever-ripening success, on this continent alone, becoming steadily mightier at the same pace that we've grown more inclusive.

The calumny draws believers, despite the fact that our democracy has accomplished more prodigious feats, more wonders and more improvements to human happiness and knowledge than all of humanity's other nations and cultures combined. By far. By orders of magnitude. The Tytler nostrum sounds "logical" in its smug contempt for the masses... except that it runs contrary to actual fact. For example, when the citizens of Athens voted against distributing the windfall from new silver mines to every citizen, and instead asked Thucydides to invest it in their future. Would most kings have done that? All through the 1990s, Bill Clinton allied himself with fiscal moderates of both parties to stave off efforts by the supply-siders to raid the budget surplus and give it all -- not to the People -- but to the rich. Clinton and Senators Tsongas (D) and Rudman (R) and others in the moderate middle were able to accomplish that because they were backed up by the public! By opinion polls showing that the middle class overwhelmingly wanted the budget surplus spent on paying down debt. And not on tax cuts for themselves. Should we be surprised? Indeed, who is more likely to have the habit of weighing the consequences of debt? Middle class citizens who must wrestle with tradeoffs, stanching their impulses and appetites every day, in favor of budgeting tightly for the future? Or aristocrats who are accustomed to indulging whims out of copious coffers, knowing that there are always more coppers, pennies, pfennigs etc to be squeezed from those below them on the pyramid?

Both before and after 2001, those who were demanding that all the surplus be "given back to us, right now" were aristocrats. The same caste that bankrupted most past societies...

MORE--A GOOD READ