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One counterexample is the American Revolution.
by lacker 7y ago
One counterexample is the American Revolution.
- billfruit 7y agoI doubt if the early United States was very much democratic in the modern sense.
- wolco 7y agoIt was probably more so then now rather than less.
- wolf550e 7y agoWhen only white land owning men could vote?
- SllX 7y agoThe status quo. You’re condemning men for maintaining the status quo in order to agree on something going forward on a handful of issues when every other word was essentially revolutionary. This is prior to the Article I branch of government, Congress, abdicating much of its power and creating this myth of coequal branches of government, and when House districts were a lot smaller, and you and your neighbors has to decide between yourselves who was in charge of certain functions of keeping society going. You know, who was going to be the local Sheriff, who was going to run the local court, who was going to deliver the mail and so on. Many of these jobs were boring and without glory, but someone had to do them. Had Madison’s Virginia Plan been implemented in full and the Connecticut Compromise wasn’t implemented, it would likely have been more democratic still. Structurally, the United States constitution is overwhelmingly democratic, and especially for the time it was written and ratified. If it has grown less democratic at all, it is due to factors the signers and ratifiers of the Constitution could never have predicted that occurred in the 230 years since. No one could have foreseen Congress would abdicate much of it’s power and responsibilities in the 20th Century, or that the Industrial Revolution would lead to the single greatest explosion of the human population in history, or that we would choose to let in so many foreigners. Nobody thought each House member would be representing a district in the hundreds of thousands at a time when they thought one House member per 50K might be too few. Is it democratic? Oh yes. It is the most democratic document of its time, and few legal documents written since then could plausibly claim to be more so.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wolco 7y agoNot just any white man but a land owner. In fairness it included straight and gay so it was more progressive. My point was it is closer to the ideals.
- mobilefriendly 7y agoIt was radically democratic for its time.
- mattdeboard 7y agoThe American Revolution produced a slave state. There might have been voting among landed gentry but it was not anything I'd call democracy in 2019
- sneak 7y agoIs “landed gentry” redundant?
- munk-a 7y agoNope, it's a pretty common term that springs from the fact that the gentry in question were such entirely due to their land holdings - there was no need to pursue outside wealth since their share of their tenant's earnings could support them entirely.
- sneak 7y agoAhh, thank you. :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway_law 7y ago>anything I'd call democracy in 2019 Democracy was created in Ancient Greece, so it may or may not surprise you to learn Democracy itself isn't anything you'd call democracy in 2019 either, as they were a "slave state" also and not everyone actually had the right to vote (in fact women couldn't vote, own/inherit land)...so maybe post Revolutionary America was a lot closer to Democracy than you think...but either way its a Republican form of Government (at least according to the Constitution) not a democracy.
- mattdeboard 7y agoI am using "democracy" as a synonym for "liberal democracy." If you tell me about a country that: - Has a beautiful founding document that ensures what we'd recognize as basic rights of all citizens - Has a well-designed federal system that empowers individuals and lower-level governments at the expense of the federal, - Has hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who form the foundation of their economy and are indeed bred into captivity, I would never, ever call that a democracy. The first two don't matter when the third is true, to me. If you would, that's fine; you wouldn't be objectively wrong.
- Kalium 7y agoThe American Revolution shouldn't be considered as a revolution. It was a bunch of organized polities that broke their political ties, but largely preserved their political, economic, and social structures and organized leadership. It was successful in no small part because it was a rebellion rather than a revolution.
- yellowapple 7y ago> but largely preserved their political, economic, and social structures and organized leadership TIL we coronated King George Washington I and established yet another divine monarchy. I mean sure, the colonies ended up directly translating to states, and (some of) those colonies happened to have bicameral legislatures with a lower house consisting of elected representatives, but that's about where the similarities between the colonies and resulting states end. Any existing leadership that continued to lead during/after the revolution did so by democratic rather than autocratic means. > it was a rebellion rather than a revolution. Those terms are not mutually exclusive. It was a revolution implemented by rebelling against the British Crown.
- Kalium 7y agoThe colonies weren't day-to-day governed from London or directly by Parliament. It may be worth recalling that colonies had their own governments, many of which included elected legislatures. In fact, how these legislative bodies were treated was a rather specific point of complaint in the Declaration of Independence.
- yellowapple 7y ago> It may be worth recalling that colonies had their own governments, many of which included elected legislatures I mentioned this already in my comment, but to clarify/reiterate: - Governors (AFAICT) were not democratically elected (they were - if I recall correctly - appointed by the Crown, as was standard for colonial governments) - The only democratically elected legislators (in the colonies that even had legislatures) were in the Lower House of each colony; the governor typically (if not always) appointed the Upper House's legislators himself (reflecting British Parliament and its House of Commons v. House of Lords, respectively) Very different from how things operate post-Revolution, what with democratically-elected governors and state senators. If any of the former colonial leadership prevailed as the new state leadership, it was by democratic rather than autocratic means.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI think of that as an independence movement, not a revolution.