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From: matthews@harvard.ARPA (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.flame
Subject: Re: America, circa 1776 vs. Nicaragua, circa 1985
Message-ID: <23@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 09:22:48 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.23
Posted: Tue Apr  9 09:22:48 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Apr-85 04:20:37 EST
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Xref: linus net.politics:7718 net.flame:8174

> > America has
> > never had a revolution -- never.  The government of post-Independence
> > America was different from the one preceding it only so far as it was
> > independent.  The element of civil war and class war was totally absent.
> > Furthermore, the equation of 18th century Enlightenment ideas with those
> > of Marxism and Leninism is an offense to the intellect.
> > 
> > Jim Matthews
> 
> Funny, as I recall my history the idea of having a Constitutional Democracy
> *without* a monarch was quite a radical idea at the time.

	Radical, but hardly revolutionary.  Besides the absence of a
nobility and monarch, our government was almost a copy of the British
democracy, with our undemocratic upper house, the Senate, emulating the
House of Lords.

>  Some have argued
> that the American Revolution [sic]
> was an inspiration to the French Revolution.

	Yes, but they have nothing besides some similar ideology in common.
We did not question the sovereignty of George III, much less behead him.
The established governments of the colonies -- the House of Burgess, and 
all the other colonial legislatures -- stood.  There was no terror, and
none of the sweeping changes in the daily lives of our citizens.  We just
stopped paying taxes to England, and stopped garrisoning troops.

> Moreover the element of "civil and class war" was not totally absent.
> Historians I have read argue that 33% of Americans supported the Revolution,
> 33% supported the British, and 33% were neutral.

	There is no evidence that this followed class lines, and it never
turned into civil war.  Tories helped the British cause, but they never
rose in armed warfare against the leaders of the War for Independence.

>  Moreover after the Revolution [sic]
> was over many Tories who supported the British during the Revolution had
> their land confiscated.  Yet it seems despite this "undemocratic" and
> "totalitarian" measure that the United States developed a healthy democracy.
> One can imagine the British arguing that such "totalitarian" moves besides
> the institution of the "radical" and "extreme" ideology of democracy without
> a monarch could endanger monarchies all over Europe. "Why this idea might
> spread throughout the world! What a horror!"  

	The British were more upset at losing the revenue and power that
the colonies represented than they were at our non-monarchist ideology.
The ideology that did scare them was that of national self-determination,
since that was what we were fighting for.  I find it incredible that you
can throw terms like "totalitarian" around this way.  We continued a 
British tradition of liberal democracy, which is as far from totalitarianism
as one can get.  This effort to find ourselves in the Nicaraguan situation
leads to gross distortions of our history.

Jim Matthews
matthews@harvard

> How could one invest power in a bunch of representatives of the ragtag masses?
> Indeed.
>            tim sevener   whuxl!orb

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