There is a quote attributed to Robert Heinlein "…when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death…”
I’ve heard this expression a lot (usually from right-leaning people who are against some new social policy. But are there any actual examples of countries whose democratically elected governments collapsed because the “people voted themselves bread and circuses”?
I’d say no because while democracies do fail, it’s usually not for one simple reason like the voters giving themselves too much largesse.
Plus, it’d be difficult to truly destroy a democracy that way. Possible to wreck an economy, yes, but that usually will cause a recession/depression that leads to an adjustment in political thinking that ameliorates the problem.
Probably the closest I can think of is Greece, which did just about largess-itself into collapse, and that economic collapse saw the rise of concerning far-right fascist parties. But it never got so bad that Greek democracy was at grave risk, but it may have gotten to the point where Greek democracy was “somewhat threatened.”
I would further challenge that example by pointing out that, as I understand it, the Greek government spent years lying to everyone about how much they had been borrowing. Even if it had led to the downfall of Greek democracy (which, as you point out, seems in no real danger of happening), you wouldn’t really be able to pin it on The People.
Venezuela is a fairly good example IMO. It had a reasonably good record of stable democracy in the post WWII period judged by its regional peers, and significant mineral wealth. And now it’s on the edge of economic and societal collapse due to a governmental system in significant part based on redistributing wealth. Of course supporters of that system wouldn’t agree. They would say the current system is correcting deep wrongs in the society and they’d blame reaction by the beneficiaries of the previous system as causing a lot of the problem now.
That’s where this will always come down to debate rather than strictly factual finding of examples. However I think Venezuela and ‘Bolivarianism’ is a pretty clear real world example of what people who would quote Heinlein are thinking about, from their POV.
Greece is another example of the Heinlein quote, at least in terms of a clear trend. It doesn’t meet the somewhat higher hurdle of OP’s second sentence of the governmental system collapsing (as opposed to a particular party losing its majority in a parliamentary system and its govt ‘collapsing’, which I assume isn’t what was meant). Nor is Venezuela literally there, but a lot closer. OTOH Venezuela doesn’t have a band of much larger and richer countries continually bailing it out for their own reasons like Greece does, not to anywhere near the same degree.
the Weimar republic …one reason it lasted as long as it did was the "anything goes " attitude that let people do things that would make the sois in Thailand look tame …
Not really, austerity was required to get loans, without which Greece would’ve collapsed anyway. I said then and now, given the nature of the EU project, the EU member states should’ve agreed to bail Greece out essentially, while trying to force Greece to agree to deficit spending rules that are sane. Instead they gave them a life raft but didn’t help them get back on the ship.
Greek spending, retirement age, and a host of other things was so immensely out of step with Greece’s ability to pay that it was heading towards this economic catastrophe whether it suffered European imposed austerity or not. It could’ve most likely significantly lessened the impact if Greece’s currency wasn’t the Euro, which is shared among many other larger/more robust/higher growth economies. Greece’s currency remained very valuable during its crisis, whereas a truly sovereign state would’ve inflated away a lot of the problems Greece suffered. Inflating away all its debt (or just defaulting on it) would have still had some bad effects though, it would’ve closed bond markets to Greece and required a “reckoning” in Greek deficit spending if it ever hoped to get loans again (and lenders would likely mandate something like dollar/Euro/pound denominated bonds with jurisdiction in a third party court like Britain’s legal system.)
Not at all. The Weimar Republic was done in by the Great Depression and Reparations payments to the Allies. In fact, in the early 1930s the Republic tried to drastically cut expenditures and the benefits paid to the unemployed, the sick, and retirees.
Even with Venezuela it wasn’t really just voters giving themselves more and more largesse. A big part of Venezuela’s problems can trace to simple gross mismanagement. Chavez nationalized a lot of things, then fired everyone who knew how to run those things, then put political loyalists into power. Like take the State oil company, which generally should be a major generator of revenue. Chavez so fucked it up that it basically could not operate effectively. This is above and beyond the damage caused by the collapsing price of oil, the Venezuelan state oil company was in such bad shape that it was actually losing its ability to pump and refine oil, such that even as most other major petro states were ramping up production to make up for the fiscal shortfalls of falling oil prices, Venezuela couldn’t. It was suffering rolling blackouts (due to mismanagement of the system’s electric grid) that shut down oil production, massive inflation was making it all but impossible for PDVSA to buy new equipment or make investments required to maintain production, and then the general cash shortages in Venezuela have made it hard for PDVSA to produce oil it can easily market.
Many of Chavez’s business policies also essentially ran huge swathes of the economy out of business (and some out of the country) and nothing really materialized to replace them.
Most of the republics of the Americas started out with constitutions that were pretty closely modeled after that of the USA. Few of them avoided a long series of repeated failures of economics and/or civil order. That is also largely true of the post-colonial republics of Africa, who modeled their constitutions after those of post-war wesern-European powers.
So there are any number of governments that ran the country into the ground following conservative principles, but for all the shoutin’ no one can find an example of one that liberalled itself to death?
I have heard that the one difference between the US Constitution and the ‘closely modeled’ versions used by any number of countries in the last century is that all of the latter, without exception, have an “escape clause” that lets the executive override constitutional authority.
Contrast the difference between Greece and Venezuela - the Euro. In Greece, financial commitments were denominated in a currency that could not change in value; whereas Venezuela has a currency that like any other country in trouble (Argentina a few times, the Weimar, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Russia) the commitment to pay deteriorated along with the currency. This is an almost self-levelling system if the government recovers the will. The government had committed to pay salaries and pensions in a currency that did not (significantly) deteriorate with their finances, very much like Detroit, Puerto Rico or the US Airlines. Perhaps we could also point to Britain before Margaret Thatcher as a democracy economically on its way downhill.
So part of the problem was that the system could not autocorrect, instead the well ran dry. However, I would suggest the counterpoint to the Heinlein quote is that nations are so interconnected today that any decent sized and truly democratic system will encounter outside pressures well before a significant collapse. Greece was unique in having a lot of implied backing from the EU and Euro zone - fairly well proven, as it turns out. Most of the banks avoided significant losses they should have gotten by recklessly lending to Greece without due diligence. Instead, the taxpayers of Germany, France and Britain bailed their banks out, so the CEO’s were not deprived of their bonuses. Most of the other failures are more attributable to a strong man government with limited understanding of economics - such as Venezuela or Zimbabwe. It wasn’t the populace voting themselves largesse, but rather the ruling elite taking much of it.
(For example, the Zimbabwe government took the farms that white settlers had appropriated from the local tribes in the 1800’s. They allegedly “gave them back to the people”. Instead, much like Russian privatization, they were distributed to friends of the ruling party who had no idea how to work them properly, so the one good thing about the Zimbabwe economy - food production - disappeared.
The austerity measures prevented them from dealing with the impending collapse, but it didn’t cause it.
Though, as I noted once before, if you read the actual guidelines that the Germans gave the Greeks, their recommendation was not austerity. NOTE: Link is to a GD post, but the comparison between the German recommendations and Greek implementation are both quoted from independent sources. I am referring only to that part.
I think that’s tending to ‘deconstruct’ the issue a little too far. If ‘the people’ elect leaders promising to give them more and more, they can’t say it’s not their fault when the leaders mess up a state company trying to squeeze more money out of it to give to the public.
PDVSA (which I happen to have worked with as a service provider at one time, though I’m basically going on general public info here) was a state owned company pre Chavez. The profits belonged to the Venezuelan people already, profits generated operating the company as a profit making concern (not that any developing world state oil company is run very efficiently compared to private sector ones, but relative to peers like Petrobras or Pemex, PDVSA had a relatively better reputation at one point). The Chavez change was indeed looking at it as more of a revenue generator not considering long term viability, ie not investing to maintain future revenues (even aside from the oil price drop recently), because the money ‘had’ to be taken out of the company. And naturally you’d want political appointees not oil business people to make such a disastrous change.
It traces back directly to a democratically enacted agenda of giving people more money (than there really is to give them) and I think fits the quote quite well in real world terms.
At some limit, we can always say even the economic problems of outright Stalinist/NK style communism is just due to ‘bad implementation’. More realistically IMO, we’d consider the limits of human nature in implementing certain systems, and include the predictable results of human nature as part of such a system. This would apply to the destruction of PDVSA IMO.
The big problem with the USA system vs. much of the third world - learning democracy. The USA had at least two generations of emerging democratic institutions, electing their mayors, and their legislative councils that “advised” the appointed governors. Eventually their entitlement became so great that they rebelled at remotely imposed taxes.
The joke about Egypt’s Morsi was “some groups consider democracy a bus that they ride until it gets to their stop.” (He was slowly stacking the deck against secular elements) This is the problem with the third world. They have no idea of democracy, generally. The idea that the police will treat everyone fairly, that the politicians will listen to the will of the people, that courts will render honest and fair decisions, even against the government, that minority rights will be respected… even the USA and British colonies are still evolving these behaviours toward the ideal.
One commentator I read suggested many people long for the strong ruler (“Mussolini made the trains run on time…”) because in a society without strong control, crime is more rampant. Trump inadvertently touched on this when praising Saddam (“He killed the terrorists”, but as Trevor Noah pointed out, “that’s because he killed everyone - bound to be some terrorists in there”) When the USA fired all the army and police, Iraq became a free-for-all; not just attacks on US forces, but against its own citizens, murder, theft, and kidnapping-for-profit were rampant. Only strong militias - run by who else, clerical leaders - provided a safe zone, provided of course you followed their rules. Democracy was not part of the equation. You vote for whom the local warlord tells you to.
“Conservative principles” is so vague as to be meaningless, the OP asked if there’s an example of a country living up to the Heinlein quote, to paraphrase, “voters granting themselves so many social welfare benefits that the country collapses into authoritarianism.”
The Corsican Republic. It predated democracy in the US. Didn’t work out that well, they were taken over by France and a later attempt to revive the republic was put down as well. There’s no doubt the founders of this country knew of the republic and followed much of the same philosophy. They didn’t collapse from voting for bread and circus that I know of, instead, like the US Articles of Confederation the government needed super-majorities to act and they didn’t have the cohesion necessary to hold off the eventual invasion. Or so I read once upon a time, my information is limited.
Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been failed democracies, though largely through kleptocracy and tribal warfare. Some of them are now succeeding, thankfully.