2 ms·

There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Strong culture. It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country and all laws passed h

• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Under most viable definitions of democracy, the US isn't the oldest. If you restrict to non-aristocratic (i.e., not limiting franchise by ancestry) representative democracy, Finland and New Zealand, among others, achieved that first; if you accept participatory democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy has it beat by even more; you need to tightly define “democracy” around exactly the US model at a particular time to make it first. > It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution.
  • _dain_ 4y ago
    >Finland didn't exist until 1918 >New Zealand didn't exist until a century after the US was founded >Iroquois Confederacy extinguished utterly, nowadays an object of idle revisionism
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    > No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution. OP mentioned the Declaration and the Constitution in the same sentence, but for the record, both are revered and held to high regard and do provide the legal foundation for the nation in its current iteration (Articles of Confederation were older than Constitution but have been cast aside due to their ineffective results).