Michael Lynch claims that the next logical step after the Tea Party's government shut down is not the dissolution of government and the slippery slope to anarchy that Machiavelli believes is Democracy's ultimate end, but rather a gradual takeover by the executive branch that will shift us more towards monarchy, dictatorship, and totalitarianism. Based on the readings we've done so far we know that Machiavelli believed the inevitable decline of a democracy would lead to anarchy. Hobbes expressed a similar prediction for the type of government that the U.S. chose to go with, saying that:
"There is a sixth doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of the commonwealth; and that is this, that the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the power of a commonwealth, but to dissolve it; for powers divided mutually destroy each other." (Leviathan, pg 230).
Were Hobbes' and Machiavelli's predictions wrong? Democracy has been around for centuries now and we have a serious shortage of anarchy on our hands. It seems, in the modern world, as if democracies are more likely to turn into police states like Lynch is predicting than to deteriorate into full blown anarchy.
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