GLENN BECK'S BONDAGE FANTASY

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute declared in The Washington Post that Glenn Beck is kind of an intellectual, because he brings on "young conservative scholars" as guests on his broadcasts and reportedly asks them "questions about Hegel" and the like. I suppose that's what Beck is doing about 5:20 into this clip from today's show, in which he discusses what a lot of right-wingers seem to think is a profound analysis of the nature of democracy by an eighteenth-century Scottish scholar.



Here's what Beck is quoting (though he confines himself to the list):

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 complacency;
* From complacency to apathy;
* From apathy to dependence;
* From dependence back into bondage.

This is supposedly a passage from the Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813) -- but there's no evidence that he wrote anything of the sort. (The quote actually seems to come from a 1943 speech, "Industrial Management in a Republic," delivered to the National Conference Board by Henning Webb Prentis, Jr., president of the Armstrong Cork Company.)

As you can see from the clip, Beck doesn't pretend to know the real or fake source of this quote (maybe he should have asked one of his young conservative scholar pals) -- but he sure believes that the cycle is real, and describes where we are now. Oh, and this forces him into a few ideological corners -- he gives dates to each of the points on the cycle, but since he has to put "complacency" and "apathy" in the stinky old '60s, he finds himself saying we went to "apathy" around ... er, 1980. Hmmm, really? Which president did we elect that year? And we got to "dependence" starting in ... 2000.

Skipped Clinton completely. Maybe Beck's a secret Big Dog admirer. Who knew?

Whoever actually wrote this, does it even make sense? Are these steps even close to inevitable? What about going from abundance to less and less abundance, which is what seems to have happened to big chunks of the American middle class for the past thirty or forty years? Why didn't Alexander Fraser Tytler/Henning Webb Prentis talk about that, hunh? Hunh?

And how can anyone say that in America "the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury"? We voted for Reagan. We voted for Bush (well, once). We frequently vote for the guys who give benefits to other people -- rich people. And we love them for it! (At least until the whole planet goes broke.)

I don't know why I'm taking this seriously -- maybe because it scares me that so many people who are actually allowed to vote and own property take it seriously. By the way, have you noticed that right-wingers love melodramatic apocryphal quotes that allegedly describe or foretell the decline of civilization? By contrast, on our side, even the fringiest lefties don't seem to go in for this sort of thing. It's strictly a right-wing phenomenon. Odd, that.