The "Tytler Cycle" has never actually happened

[Politruk]

This canard started circulating around 2000, for some reason.

The following is misattributed to Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler:

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 generous gifts 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 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, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith 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 into bondage.

Two things wrong with that:

1. Tytler never wrote it.

2. If he had written it, he would have been wrong. The cycle described has never happened in all of human history. Republics have self-destructed, but never by the route of the people voting themselves largesse from the treasury. Nor has any civilization gone through the bondage-faith-courage-etc. process described.

 

[Politruk]

As for where it actually came from:

There is no reliable record of Alexander Tytler's having written any part of the text.[21] In fact, it actually comprises two parts which did not begin to appear together until the 1970s. The first paragraph's earliest known appearance[22] is in an op-ed piece by Elmer T. Peterson in the 9 December 1951 The Daily Oklahoman, which attributed it to Tytler:

Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy".[23]
The list beginning "From bondage to spiritual faith" is commonly known as the "Tytler Cycle" or the "Fatal Sequence". Its first known appearance was in a 1943 speech by Henning W. Prentiss, Jr., president of the Armstrong Cork Company and former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, delivered at the February 1943 convocation of the General Alumni Society of the University of Pennsylvania. The speech was subsequently published under the titles "The Cult of Competency"[24] and "Industrial Management in a Republic".[25]

 

[Politruk]

I suspect it started circulating in 2000 in reaction to protests of that year's election result as undemocratic -- like, "What's so great about democracy anyway?"

 

[Politruk]

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