With all the hubub going on with Congress, I felt this was somewhat relevent:

The Greeks, who had a penchant for giving names to things, had a convenient label for that source: anacyclosis. That was the moniker coined by the Greek historian Polybius, who chronicled the conquest of Greece by the Romans in the second century BCE. He noted that the squabbling city-states of the Greek world tended to cycle through a distinctive sequence of governments—monarchy, followed by aristocracy, followed by democracy, and then back around again to monarchy. It’s a cogent model, especially if you replace “monarchy” with “dictatorship” and “aristocracy” with “junta” to bring the terminology up to current standards.

A short and modernized form of the explanation—those of my readers who are interested in the original form should consult the Histories of Polybius—is that in every dictatorship, an inner circle of officials and generals emerges. This inner circle eventually takes advantage of weakness at the top to depose the dictator or, more often, simply waits until he dies and then distributes power so that no one figure has total control; thus a junta is formed. In every country run by a junta, in turn, a wider circle of officials, officers, and influential people emerges; this wider circle eventually takes advantage of weakness at the top to depose the junta, and when this happens, in ancient Greece and the modern world alike, the standard gambit is to install a democratic constitution to win popular support and outflank remaining allies of the deposed junta. In every democracy, finally, competing circles of officials, officers, and influential people emerge; these expand their power until the democratic system freezes into gridlock under the pressure of factionalism or unsolved crisis; the democratic system loses its legitimacy, political collapse follows, and finally the head of the strongest faction seizes power and imposes a dictatorship, and the cycle begins all over again.

It can be educational to measure this sequence against recent history and see how well it fits. Russia, for example, has been through a classic round of anacyclosis since the 1917 revolution: dictatorship under Lenin and Stalin, a junta from Khrushchev through Gorbachev, and a democracy—a real democracy, please remember, complete with corruption, rigged elections, and the other features of real democracy—since that time. China, similarly, had a period of democracy from 1911 to 1949, a dictatorship under Mao, and a junta since then, with movements toward democracy evident over the last few decades. Still, the example I have in mind is the United States of America, which has been around the cycle three times since its founding; the one difference, and it’s crucial, is that all three stages have taken place repeatedly under the same constitution.

A case could be made that this is the great achievement of modern representative democracy—the development of a system so resilient that it can weather anacyclosis without cracking. The three rounds of anacyclosis we’ve had in the United States so far have each followed the classic pattern; they’ve begun under the dominance of a single leader whose overwhelming support from the political class and the population as a whole allowed him to shatter the factional stalemate of the previous phase and impose a radically new order on the nation. After his death, power passes to what amounts to an elected junta, and gradually defuses outwards in the usual way, until a popular movement to expand civil rights and political participation overturns the authority of the junta. Out of the expansion of political participation, factions rise to power, and eventually bring the mechanism of government to a standstill; crisis follows, and is resolved by the election of another almost-dictator.

Glance back over American history and it’s hard to miss the pattern, repeating over a period that runs roughly seventy to eighty years. The dictator-figures were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom overturned existing structures in order to consolidate their power, and did so with scant regard for existing law. The juntas were the old Whigs, the Republicans, and the New Deal Democrats, each of them representatives of a single social class; they were overthrown in turn by Jacksonian populism, the Progressive movement, and the complex social convulsions of the Sixties, each of which diffused power across a broader section of the citizenry. The first cycle ended in stalemate over the issue of slavery; the second ended in a comparable stalemate over finding an effective response to the Great Depression; the third—well, that’s where we are right now.

There’s no shortage of crises sufficient to tip the current system into its final stalemate, and no shortage of people in the political class who show every sign of being willing to give it that final push. The great difficulty just now, it seems to me, is precisely that fashionable contempt for democracy as it actually exists that I addressed earlier in this essay. In 1860, that habit was so far from finding a place in the political dialogue that the constitution of the Confederate States of America was in most respects a copy of the one signed at Philadelphia a long lifetime before. In 1932, though a minority of Americans supported Marxism, fascism, or one of the other popular authoritarianisms of the day, the vast majority who put Roosevelt into the White House four times in a row expected him to maintain at least a rough approximation of constitutional government.

That’s much less true this time around. Granted, there’s less public support for overtly authoritarian ideologies—I expect to see Marxism make a large-scale comeback on the American left in the next few years, for reasons I’ll explain in a future post—but as Oswald Spengler pointed out almost a century ago, in the endgame of democratic societies, it’s not the cult of ideology but the cult of personality that’s the real danger. As the Russian proverb warns, it’s never a good idea to let the perfect become the enemy of the good; in our time, as a growing number of Americans insist that America isn’t a democracy because it doesn’t live up to their fantasies of political entitlement, it’s all too possible that one or more mass movements could coalesce around some charismatic figure who offers to fix everything that’s wrong with the country if only we let him get rid of all those cumbersome checks and balances that stand in his way. How many of the benefits of democracy I listed above would survive the victory of such a movement is not a question I would like to contemplate.

-From Democracy's Arc by John Michael Greer

Incidentally, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were my three favorites. Your thoughts?

ssssssoooooooo llllllloooooonnnnnngggggg.

Right when I start finishing my story about government, this pops up.
Interesting timing, to say the least.

1897211 If they were dictators, they were incredibly benevolent ones compared to most.

There's a popular reflex to assign all of these deep, repeating patterns to history. This is appealing because it allows us to predict the future with great accuracy, or so we think.

But in the end a lot of the changes we see around us are simply due to either non-repeating change (like technological progress) or the individual action of multitudes of factors (thus hard to predict due to chaos theory).

That's not to say there aren't tendencies. That certain things are more likely to occur given past events. But I feel the quoted text is overreaching to a large extent.

1897383 Agreed, I think "dictator" is too strong of a word. Those three were in no way similar to various blood stained monsters of history. They were political strongmen, certainly, and they did shake a lot of things up when they were elected, but they didn't sacrifice Christians to lions or send people who disagreed with them to the gulags.

1897384 I don't necessarily agree with this text either, as human politics are far too tremulous and chaotic to place into neat, arbitrary little phases. Just food for thought mainly.

1897256

1897211 Post necromancy, but couldn't resist as a newbie to this group.

Anacyclosis is a very common theme in China too (funny with all these ancient civilizations and obsession with societal collapse). In fact the best-known literary work of the civilization, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, starts off with the lines "it is a fact of the world that lengthy union engenders division; lengthy division engenders union".

I think that a prime cause of anacylosis was the eventual concentration of power and land into the hands of a few. Certainly in Chinese history it's all been about each dynasty starting off on a fresh page, provincial landlords slowly accumulating land, and then either getting overthrown by peasants/overthrowing the decadent dynasty. I suspect it was the same in the Mediterranean world as well - the Roman Republic's fall was certainly due, in no small part, to the powerful patricians of Rome who manipulated the population to their own benefit: Crassus, Pompey and Caesar being only the most famous ones.

As such, I find a lot objectionable to the Greer piece - I doubt Communism can make a "comeback" in America since it was never adopted by the majority of the American left in the first place; his open hostility to so-called "entitlement" is actually accelerating the capture of political institutions by the rich, and he misses the point about popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy - it's not the democracy part that people are angry over, it's the representative part. People no longer believe the system listens to their needs. Both progressives and the Tea Party agree to that.

Incidentally, I Roosevelt, Lincoln and Truman are the top three on my list. Washington - he set a very good example for everybody else to follow, but his impact is dulled by the fact that his beliefs were those of an 18th century colonial gentleman, and as such have reduced impact on the modern world.

Re: phases, while human society did change massively due to technological change, in some ways we've never fundamentally changed our way we organize our societies. Basic human psychology, in addition, has seemingly remained the same for recorded history. Hence Twain's famous phrase about history.