A good thing to ponder is how America has gone this long without falling into an autocracy of some sort. That is the natural end of democracy and it is something the Founders understood. They were educated men and that meant knowing their Greek and Roman history. The Greeks would regularly appoint a dictator to deal with emergencies like war or social unrest. The Romans eventually succumbed to autocracy. The French Revolution eventually gave us Napoleon. The Germans gladly accepted Hitler as the Fuehrer.

The natural course of popular government is to give way to some form of authoritarianism, either supported by the masses or imposed by the elite. Even today, we see European countries slowly turning over their national sovereignty to an un-elected bureaucracy. The strange truth of democracy is it eventually votes itself out of existence. The people, it would seem, simply tire of the responsibility. Perhaps it is just a phase societies go though as they swing from disorder to order. Maybe people are just incapable of keeping it.

In a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in New York, Alexander Hamilton said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” This attitude was representative of the Founders as a whole.

The puzzle is how has America slowed this process and still maintained some sense of self-governance. One reason is the constraints of the original Constitution. Today, it is the Bible of conservatives or maybe the Ten Commandments. It is a “who we are document” for the civic nationalists. In reality, it was a strongly anti-democratic documents that sharply limited popular participation in the federal government. The early American republic was much closer to Sparta than it was to Athens and that was deliberate.

The Spartan nature of the document a natural hostility to power within the ruling elite of America into the 20th century. In other times and places, the strong man arguing against democracy, promising to cut through the clutter and solve the problems, had no emotional barrier like that to overcome. American rulers have to swear to live within the Constitution to get a purchase with the public. Opponents of the “man of action” promising fix things in a hurry, therefore had a ready weapon to check their path to despotism.

Another reason, at least in America, is that the Progressives always gets ahead of themselves and anger the public. The Right never wins by their own accord, but the Left does lose from time to time. The first example of secular madness in America was the abolitionist movement. The fanatics of the North agitated for the end of slavery ending in the slaughter of 600,000 white people in order to free 3 million pieces of farm equipment. Reconstruction foundered because the public grew weary of the fanatics.

Another useful example of this phenomenon is the Wilsonian Era. Many on the Right have declared Wilson as history’s greatest monster, but that’s nonsense. His opponent was the blood thirsty Theodore Roosevelt, so Wilson was not all bad. Still, he was a true believer and convinced he could redesign American culture. He was probably our first technocratic ideologue. Maybe he is best described a proto-fascist totalitarian.  Of course, he went too far and the reaction to Wilsonian Democracy was the Return to Normalcy.

In fact, the pattern that started with the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century has been periods of liberal fanaticism followed by periods of normalcy. The FDR/Truman years brought excesses and a snap back with Eisenhower. Then it was the Johnson years, that brought more excess and then a corresponding revolt by the “silent majority” in the election of Nixon. Democracy in America has been spasm of progressive excess followed by the long hangover, which is then followed by another binge of excess.

This phenomenon is well documents and called the ratchet effect. The nation moves toward despotism, then takes a small step back, followed by another great leap toward despotism and some small drawback. Maybe the reason America has not collapsed into despotism is that we’re only into a century of democracy. Maybe we’re just a few more turns of the wheel before the public demands a strong man to impose order. Perhaps the Progressive fanatics have just not gone far enough or crazy enough to break the system.

The other thing worth noting is the compression of the cycles. The pendulum is now swinging wildly between radical change and modest reform. When every political institution has an approval rate below 50% and the most democratic one, Congress, is down at 15%, the path is clear for a strong man to take over. When the lawlessness of the Obama administration is finally revealed, it is possible the public will simply throw in the towel on democracy. Black triumphalism could very well portend a looming snap back.