This is an E-mail that has made the rounds several times since the Gore whine fest, as he lost the election to Bush. I’ve always been impressed by it, but a quick search shows it to be a urban legend. However nearly all the facts are true with only the source (Alexander tyler) being in question. And anyone who knows anything of history knows that generally speaking, the description of the fall or decline of empires is right on the money. So I thought it to be worth reprinting here.
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 year s.”
“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”
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
M
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won
by: Gore: 13.2; Bush: 2.1
“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…”
The United States 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 Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to
twenty-million criminal invaders called illegal’s and
they vote, then we can say good-bye to the USA in
fewer than five years.