The Death of Democracy

That quote is a hoax. John MacArthur used it after the election. I wrote to him but his staff replied that they did not have access to his notes, which I considered a concession of sorts. I posted a long thread about it here on the Baptist Board. The hoax dates back into World War II with a speech given somewhere and then was echoed in a newspaper in the 1950s. It gained momentum when Reagan used it. If it is legitimate, there is no documentation for it on the internet.

I live in a republic anyway.

Here is my work on this Alexander Tyler:

http://www.baptistboard.com/showthread.php?t=84145

Anyway, if anyone has any information on the actual historical documentation of this quotation, I would like to know about it.

 

Hoax or not, it's a true statement.

 

Fine, just don't attribute it to a non-existent book by an obscure Scottish professor. It probably was the idea of the unknown speaker at a New York City hotel conference in World War II who wanted to dignify his opinion with some European source or else it was written by the author of the letter to the editor of the newspaper who knew of the Scottish professor and wanted to dignify his letter to the editor.

If John MacArthur can't verify the source, then I am beginning to think that it is lost in the mists of history. But I think that the modern source originates with Reagan who is famous for carrying old newspaper clippings and therefore might have had the letter to the editor of an Oklahoma newspaper sent to him at some point. He became well-known in the 1950s with the GE Theater tv show and GE sent him all over the country to speak to their employees so Reagan would be a logical person to send such a clipping to. The other main conservative of note at the time was Barry Goldwater.

 

Maybe a hoax maybe not... True anyway. And here is the same idea, but more concise, I think.

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

And yes America is a Republic not a Democracy... for which we should all thank God for.

 

Apparently the de Tocqueville quotation dates to 1835 and his book Democracy in America. The Scottish professor Tyler or Tytler lived from 1747 to 1813. Perhaps the de Tocqueville quotation from his well-known book was turned into this for political reasons and attributed to the professor to provide a second witness to de Tocqueville:

"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. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from 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 dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."


That was more or less what John MacArthur said after the re-election of Obama, although he did attribute it to Tytler.


If this statement was composed somewhere from 1941 to 1951, when it was published in Oklahoma, then the author must have had 1976 as the end of the republic date.

Let me conclude that when I first heard this quotation on YouTube from John MacArthur, I thought that it was very interesting and I wanted a written statement of it as well as an exact source. I began my search for it with those intentions only. It was only after I began researching the quotation that I found that it may be spurious. So far no one has documented that such a book existed that the Scottish professor allegedly wrote and no one has documented the hard copy source of this quotation. If the quotation is true, no one has documented it on the internet and many others have said that it is an urban legend. No one seems to have a copy of his book. That is how the matter rests at this time.

 

Agree with the statement that the USA is a Republic and not a democracy----true democracy is tyranny--which is where we're headed--which is why our Founding Fathers set in place whats called the Electoral College--which prevents what I would call a "runaway democracy" during a presidential election:type::type: A true democracy would spell the end of a true republic!!

 

AMEN!

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

 

Precisely! :applause:

Really wish more people would understand that.