The eight stages of democracy (2024)

U.S. constitution

(Evan Belanger/Alabama Media Group)

According to Lord Tytler, a Scottish Historian, the average age of the world's democracies is around 200 years. After two hundred years, the nations collapse due to various economic policies and be followed by a dictatorship. Lord Tytler identified "Eight Stages of a Democracy", from beginning to end. The eight stages go 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, and finally from dependence back to bondage. Life and our universe moves in cycles, and history is no different. So, in our Democratic form of a Republic, which stage do you suppose we are in?

Let us look at the underlying economic data. While most news coverage about the circus of our election focuses on tweets and insults, the American nation is $19 trillion in debt. (if you'd like, on your computer or calculator, type that out. It's YUGE!) After WWII, our national debt was $269 billion. That was after we saved the world from evil. We reached our first trillion in debt in 1982, a year before I was born (34 years ago). Since then, our debt has increased, but recently we have seen a tremendous upward spring of our spending which has gone out of control. Our national debt reached $8 trillion in 2008, and in 2016 it is $19 trillion, and that increased projection is not nearing an end anytime soon, which equals $55,000 for every American citizen. It is estimated that our unfunded liabilities are near $100 trillion, and those payments include Social Security for all Americans, pensions for all federal government employees, and Medicare and Medicaid payments. If you happen to be in my generation and paying social security, you laugh when the conversation comes up if you think it will be there for us.

Most Americans remember when the Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney mentioned in his off-handed comment four years ago about the 47 percent who pay no income taxes and have no skin in the game. Well, those numbers are frightening when you realize that we pay taxes on almost all aspects of American life, and we are still going further and further into the economic abyss. SNAP recipients (food stamps) have risen from 8.4 percent of Americans in 2007 to 14.2 percent in 2015. The labor participation rate (amount of able bodied Americans looking for work) is decreasing to levels not seen since the Carter Administration, as citizens are giving up and accepting government benefits at rapidly increasing levels. According to government statistics, 51 percent of American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

The stereotypical welfare queen of the imagination no longer justly applies, however, as the area known as the DC Corridor has reaped more benefits from government contracts and handouts than those on "welfare" by a couple billion dollars. If you have spent any time in the outlining areas of Maryland or Virginia, you get to witness the firsthand affects of large government spending, as those areas are full of McMansions and are recession proof. The top three income earning counties in America are located outside of DC, where the median household income is well over $90,000, and the wealth and power in the area are protected by government contracts using our taxes and the borrowing power of the US government.

The average US home-owning household pays roughly $14,000, or 27 percent of their total earnings, in taxes (from property to sales to income to everything else). What do we get in return? A large government who is incapable of producing anything of quality. The Affordable Care Act is a joke, as it has reduced the number of uninsured Americans from 15% to 10% after spending billions, the education in this nation is not in the top 10 worldwide, and our quality of life is dwindling.

Maybe that is why we have a presidential candidate who is promising a return to the "glory days" of our democracy. Maybe his promise to turn back the clock on livelihood of our nation is resonating with an apathetic public who yearns for a better governance, but wants someone else to put in the work. Surely, there were people in Rome before the fall that saw the disaster ahead, and many Americans can see the writing on the wall, as the middle class in our nation continues to wallow without a significant increase in earning power in 30 years.

What stage of our democracy are we in? If you ask me, we are retreating from apathy to dependence, as we have not heeded the warnings of Benjamin Franklin, who famously wrote that "when people find they can vote themselves money, that will be the end of the republic".