“Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.” —Joseph Story (1833)

In 1764, as revered historian Edward Gibbon “sat musing amidst the ruins” of Rome, he was inspired to write about the failure of republics. It is no small irony that the original text of his seminal work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in 1776, as our Patriot ancestors were declaring the innate rights of all people to Liberty. Gibbon detailed how opulence and entitlement led to the incremental degradation of civic virtue.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, an 18th-century lawyer and professor of history at the prestigious University of Edinburgh, summarized the link between opulence and loss of virtue as follows: “[Patriotism], like all other affections and passions, operates with the greatest force where it meets with the greatest difficulties … but in a state of ease and safety, as if wanting its appropriate nourishment, it languishes and decays. … It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grandeur and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues.”

This contiguous rise and decline has been characterized as “The Cycle of Democracy” (attributed to Tytler as its source).

The cycle follows this sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law);
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 (rule of men).

Tytler’s assertion about the relationship between opulence and decline of virtues reflected his astute understanding of human nature.

Put another way by contemporary post-apocalyptic novelist Michael Hopf in Those Who Remain: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

I put a lot of credence in this notion of a Cycle of Democracy.

Fortunately, our Founders established a republican form of government in order to enfeeble this democracy cycle. However, those republican protections are being broadly undermined by the systemic suppression of free speech by the Left’s mass media propaganda machine.

The politicians who control most of these propagandists promote “democracy” — dependence on the state by expanding statist power through the redistribution of wealth and rewarding votes from their subjugated constituencies with benefits from the public treasury. Thus, because of a misinformed public, our Republic is at higher risk of following the same degenerative cycle as democracies unless there is intervention by leaders committed to republican principles — a higher calling than their own self-interests.

As you know, our national political parties, Republican and Democrat, take their respective names from these two distinct and antithetical forms of government. Their names alone project whether they promote the Liberty of republicanism or the tyranny of democracy.

To be clear, that is exactly what Biden is referencing when he asks, “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” It’s what he means when he incessantly demands that you “support democracy.” “Sacred cause” because the state is the Demos’ deity. When Biden says “democracy,” the means democratic socialism, ultimately, statist authoritarian rule.

So the question as we consider the politics and culture of our nation today is, are we now irrevocably locked into the Cycle of Democracy? Will Liberty (Rule of Law) be incrementally degraded until it is completely overwhelmed by tyranny (rule of men)?

First, let’s consider where in the Cycle of Democracy we are.

I believe we are, to varying degrees, between “Complacency/Apathy” and “Dependence/Bondage.”

Regarding “Dependence/Bondage,” philosopher Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, wrote, “The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.” Consequently, we must tirelessly and vigorously fight against those who propagate servitude to and dependence upon the state.

So, the more complicated question is, how did we get here?

It is a question that must be resolved to avoid sliding further into Dependence and Bondage.

I previously wrote about the rise of “Gen N: The Narcissist Generation,” a growing malignancy of snowflake narcissists who are a subset of the Gen Y and Gen Z age groups, the offspring of Boomer and Gen X parents.

For context, “Baby Boomers” were born between 1946 and 1964 during the post-war baby boom. They were followed by “Generation Xers,” those born between 1965 and 1980.

(For the record, I am classified as a “late Boomer,” but I reject that generational assignment as I am, first and foremost, a card-carrying member of Gen L — the Liberty Generation, which includes American Patriots of all generations.)

The offspring of Boomers and Gen Xers are “Generation Y” (a.k.a. “Millennials”), those born from 1981 to 1996, and “Generation Z,” those born from 1997 to 2012.

The Gen N narcissist subgroup is drawn from the youngest of the Gen Y Millennials (28 and 35), and the oldest of the Gen Z cohort (18 and 27), in other words, between the ages of 18-35.

The most contemptible of this Gen Y/Z subgroup emerged in force during the “summer of rage” ignited by Joe Biden and his Demos just before the 2020 election. The most disruptive among them were the mostly white “Black Lives Matter” apologists and the antifa fascists.

Since then, other Gen Narcissist collectives have emerged, drawing attention to themselves by continuing to disrupt the lives of Americans across the nation. This would include continued protests to defund police and protests against so-called “climate change.”

The latest iteration of their attention-getting folly is the anti-Semitic campus protests to support Hamas terrorists, but to be clear, only a few of these campus Gen N narcissists are really devoted to the “Palestinian Cause.” For most, Gaza is just their cause of the day, the latest “shiny thing” that these developmentally arrested adolescents have latched onto in order to draw attention to themselves. In pursuit of that attention, they have perfected their penchant to be “Useful Idiots,” Western apologists for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology.

Because these narcissistic miscreants get a lot of media attention, the tendency is to assume their whole generation is cast in this mold and the future is bleak, but again, these noxious Gen Narcissists are only a fractional subgroup of Gen Y and Z, perhaps better described as a degeneration than a generation.

This Gen N subgroup is the spawn of woke Boomers and Gen Xers, primarily suburban “white privilege” Democrats, the most influential of those being inheritance welfare leftists — the effluent of generational wealth and privilege. While there are plenty of these elitist Boomers and Gen Xers in urban centers, most choose to live in the safety and comfort of suburbia, far from the poor masses they have propagated, and with whom they pretend to be allied.

Many of these suburban parents were easy to spot in 2020, as they virtue-signaled their privilege with Biden/Harris yard signs and bumper stickers, just as they did in 2016 with Hillary Clinton political paraphernalia to ensure everyone knew they were not among the “deplorables” who supported Donald Trump.

Of course, the Gen N miscreants are not just the prodigy of leftists. Some of these perpetual adolescents were born into homes of affluent Republicans who have spent more time exercising their affluence than they have raising good stewards of Liberty for future generations.

And the abdication of that parental responsibility is a threat to the Republic.

Notably, the Cycle of Democracy’s “Faith/Courage/Liberty/Abundance” enjoyed by those Boomers/Gen X parents was provided by the “The Greatest Generation” of Americans — those who lived through the Great Depression, many of whom served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and who built businesses small and large resulting in unprecedented economic expansion that surpassed all other nations. It was they who provided the ease and affluence that would regrettably enable many in the generations that followed, those who inherited rather than earned Liberty, to enjoy the fruits of freedom provided by previous generations and slide into the Selfishness/Complacency/Apathy range of the cycle.

Thus, the answer to the question of how we got to this point in the Cycle of Democracy is that Complacency/Apathy results from Abundance/Selfishness. As was the case with the Fall of the Roman Empire, unmitigated opulence and entitlement leads to the degradation of virtue.

However, the loud protests of the current generational subgroup of narcissistic snowflakes now infesting some urban centers does not mean we are doomed to the cyclical progression from dependence to bondage — at least not if enough voices rise to subdue the “progressives.”

I do not subscribe to the apocalyptic view that we are irrevocably destined to bondage before faith and Liberty can emerge again, nor do I ignore the perils of that possibility. The great hope for our future rests in the fact that most citizens across our nation, however badly misinformed some may be, are good people.

We are still a Republic, not a democracy, but the dangerous erosion of republican principles is a serious threat. The only way to stop the slide is to boldly speak the truth.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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