Episode
The True Danger to Democracy isn't Trump, its Democrats
- Podcast
- Freedom Unaffiliated
- Published
- May 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 401
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://thinkfreedom.org
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Summary
Alexander Fraser Tytler was a judge, historian and professor of history in Scotland, born in 1747, who observed that, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.” Tytler further observed, “The average of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 hundred years. These nations have progressed through this 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 again to bondage.” Voting in largesse In this, America’s 250th year, we’ve beaten the average, but this sequence has a spooky resemblance to our trajectory and offers a dire warning. Our founders had the wisdom and foresight to craft a constitution designed to protect individual liberty and limit government. Government is necessary, but government isn’t society. It’s a subset of society and subservient to the people, it’s not their master or their mother. The American Dream isn’t winning the Powerball lottery. That’s just a lucky windfall. It’s about the opportunity individuals have in this country to achieve success and even greatness through ingenuity, hard work, and personal responsibility. As government at all levels has expanded, the American dream has decayed into the American entitlement, with government assuming the role of supreme benefactor — “sharing the wealth,” as President Obama put it — with punitive income taxes on productive taxpayers redistributed to net tax receivers. When the nu…