“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
Discussion
Can or can't ?
sometimes it's a marvel at the evil genius behind the whole thing.
Already witness it in my country. Fucked up....
Imagine if we somehow normalized Bitcoin as a fundraising tool for political campaigns, you’d see formal adoption balloon!
It only endured until Corporate America discovered they could bribe Congress. America has been in gradual decline for at least 20 years. What we're seeing now is just the inevitable acceleration.
50 years, the seeming peaceful zone and growth up to the 90s was actually artificial from the debt bubble. It’s the front side where all the benefit rests, the last 20 years have been the backside where all the costs show up…
but otherwise yes, I completely agree:
nostr:npub1h8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wq36rpev love your work but I’m not sure that’s an actual quote by de Tocqueville… 😬
That said, it’s still a valid and very insightful quote! 🔥
Really? I have it saved as him and I had multiple sources with the same. You have any info on who it actually was?
I can’t say for sure but it’s definitely not in “Democracy in America”. For what it’s worth the quote is listed as misattributed on goodreads and wikiquote..
Apparently, per wikiquote that is, “the earliest known occurrence is as an unsourced attribution to Tytler in "This is the Hard Core of Freedom" by Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951)”
That’s funny it’s also listed as him eon goodreads. Must be multiple versions of it with one as Alexis and another as unattributed.
Goodreads is actually where I copied it from, but that’s only because I was looking it up there. I had it saved from somewhere else where I didn’t save the link apparently. That’s why I went to goodreads. But it didn’t have a link to where it was from, only his name.
So for another week or 2?
that dude was smart.
Alexander Fraser Tytler “The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 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 selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
Damn, Toqueville called it, like a long ass time ago.
Prescient