History often provides unpleasant answers to questions we are afraid to ask…
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
Those are the words of Marcus Tillius Cicero as written by Taylor Caldwell in her book Iron Pillar, the story of the fall of the Roman Empire and the statesman Cicero who tried in vain to save the republic he loved from the forces of tyranny.
So where is America today, are we destined to retrace the steps of Rome and other fallen empires?
Again, we can look to history for clues, if not the answer…
In an article by Marty Robinson Posted October 17, 2019 on the St. Paul Research web page:
The following quote attributed to Scottish history professor Alexander Tyler in 1787 University of Edinborough, seems to portray an accurate reflection of what has occurred during our 200+ years of existence as a democracy.
“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
“These words were written two years before George Washington became our first President.
Tytler discovered the average lifespan of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200-250 years, while always progressing through the same 9 step sequence he outlined.
Some examples:
- Assyria (859-612 B.C.): a 247-year reign.
- Persia (538-330 B.C.): a 208-year reign.
- Greece (331-100 B.C.): a 231-year reign.
- The Roman Republic (260-27 B.C.): a 233-year reign.
- The Roman Empire (27 B.C.-180 A.D.): a 207-year reign.
- The Arab Empire (634-880 A.D.): a 246-year reign.
- The Mameluke Empire (1250-1517 A.D.): a 267-year reign.
- The Ottoman Empire (1320-1570 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
- Spain (1500-1750 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
- Romanov Russia (1682-1916 A.D.): a 234-year reign.
- Great Britain (1700-1950 A.D.): a 250-year reign.
- The United States of America (1776-?): 243 years and counting.
Today this is referred to as “The Tytler Cycle,” or “The Fatal Sequence.”
Is this not where America is heading today?
According to the Aspen Institute, the Democrats proposed “Green New Deal” will cost between $52-$93 trillion over ten years—an estimated $600,000 per American household.
Their proposed “Medicare for All” program would cost approximately $32-$38 trillion over the first ten years, according to studies by the American Action Forum, the Mercatus Center and the Urban Institute.
And we recently witnessed an entire stage full of Democratic candidates for president raise their hands in unison promising their government healthcare plans would also cover undocumented immigrants…
And it will not end there…
Because with socialism, it never ends until they run out of our money to redistribute.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) has just proposed her new “Just Society.” It’s a platform of five bills and one resolution that will “build a just society to protect our communities and uplift our neighbors.”
Her program will impose rent control nationwide, raise the national poverty baseline to $38,000 per year, place paroles on all welfare programs and provide the entirety of American health and welfare services to all illegal aliens whether they want them or not.
But it doesn’t end there, because as always, this is about moving America away from nationalism and self-rule, into global governance, where we’ll be ruled by unelected international bureaucrats as in the failed European Union…
As AOC’s pact would also require the United States to sign an “international agreement” that stipulates all people have the right to fair and just conditions of work, social security, and an adequate standard of living, including the guarantee of adequate food, clothing, housing and healthcare.
And before you give AOC any credit for these being new and original ideas…
Let me introduce you to the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
Richard Cloward and Francis Fox-Piven were Columbia University professors who created what is now referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
First published as an article in “The Nation” magazine in 1966, it was a strategy to overwhelm the public welfare system in order to create a crisis so large, that it would lead to the replacement of capitalism with socialism.
And their strategy nearly worked…
U.S. welfare recipients increased from 4.3 to 10.8 million from 1965 to 1974, including one million welfare recipients alone in New York City, which led to the city filing bankruptcy in 1975, nearly pulling the entire state down with it.
And today, over 50 years since Cloward & Piven initially proposed their plan, the strategy is alive and well…
You saw it with the flood of organized caravans of illegal immigrants overwhelming our southern border in an ongoing attempt to collapse our welfare system, while tipping the scales of the 2020 election in the Democrats’ favor… by creating a permanent voting class dependent on their promise of free social programs.
And it’s not just about overwhelming the welfare system and creating a permanent voting class for Democrats…
President Barack Obama used it with “Fast & Furious,” an attempt to undermine the 2nd Amendment by flooding Mexico with illegal U.S. firearms…. unleashing a barrage of gun violence among Mexican drug cartels to be blamed on America’s 2nd Amendment.
And you can see the tentacles of Cloward-Piven in the Green New Deal as well…
As the new “greens” are really nothing more than the old “reds.”
Writer Jeannie DeAngelis may have said it best in a recent article in American Thinker…
“While the lyrics to the socialist song may have changed, the Marxist melody remains the same.”
So, which will it be America?
Will we rise to the occasion as our forefathers have done time and time again… answering the call to become one of America’s greatest generations?
Or are we destined by Tytler’s “Fatal Sequence” to become its last?
Doomsayers for many years have been predicting the decline and fall of this country.
Yes, the future is bleak.
Our problem is that we don’t really learn from history. George Santayana said that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The philosopher Hegel said, “What experience and history teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”
Or as Winston Churchill said, “The one thing we have learned from history is that we don’t learn from history.”
Words we often hear are: “It can’t happen here,” or “Our country is different.” But the reality is that nations are born and die just like individuals. They may last longer than the average person’s lifespan. But the reality is that nations also die.
As I said earlier, history has shown that the average age of the great civilizations is around two hundred years. Countries like Great Britain exceed the average while other countries like the United States are just now reaching the average age.
Each of the great civilizations in the world passed through a series of stages from their birth to their decline to their death. Which brings us back to the nine stages.
These are the nine stages through which the great civilizations have gone. Notice the progression from bondage to liberty back to bondage. The first generation throws off the shackles of bondage only to have a later generation through apathy and indifference allow itself to once again be enslaved.
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota points out some interesting facts and correlations between the above passage and the 2008 Presidential election of Barack Obama:
Number of States won by:
Democrats: 19
Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by:
Democrats: 580,000
Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by:
Democrats: 127 million
Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Democrats: 13.2
Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: ‘In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…’ Olson believes the United States is somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tylter’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 immigrants and they are granted the right to vote, then we can say goodbye to our country and freedoms in fewer than ten years.
The world is full of the debris of past civilizations and others are known to have existed, which have not left any debris behind them but have just simply disappeared.
So, Let’s review:
A society starts out in bondage, meaning no or very limited freedoms. Now faced with an exceedingly difficult situation (bondage), they turn to religion and religious faith. Through this they achieve the courage they need to fight for and win their freedom. Next, through the benefits of freedom, they achieve an abundance in material things.
Now we start into the other side of the circle/cycle. We get selfishness and laziness setting in. Then we get apathy and finally dependence. Then we arrive back up at the top with bondage again.
So folks, based on what I have shared with you today, Where do you think we are on Tytler’s Cycle?
I think we are somewhere between Apathy and Dependence.