“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
By contrast to literally every other country. Yes very much in that time period. Believe it or not, most monarchies were also completely fine with slavery and plantations. And their citizens had even less political power.
One of the proximate causes of the American Revolution was British abolitionism leaking into colonial politics.
You had ex-military ultra-wealth planation owners defecting to the revolution in drovers following Dunmore’s Proclamation.
They were completely fine with collecting rents off their subjects - slave or free. But quite a few of them had strong reservations against chattel slavery (the Spanish Catholics, most notably). And more simply could not stomach the expense of policing transatlantic trade from piracy.
That is what ultimately lead to the outlawing of the practice across Europe.
Democracy isn’t defined relative to other countries. Only property-owners could vote, and only white men could own property, so that means the vast majority of the population couldn’t vote. That doesn’t sound like a democracy to me, that sounds like an aristocracy. I will grant you it was more democratic than monarchies and such, but even some of them (like the UK) had a parliamentary system so the king’s power wasn’t universal. They were deeply unequal, of course, but that’s just the pot calling the kettle black, because so was (and is) the US.
Yes because if it isn’t perfect may as well not even try.
I’m sure glad that United States never decided to split away from England and was unable to influence the entirety of Western democracy to form.
Without USA, you never get the French revolution as Thomas Paine never publish common sense without French revolution. You don’t get free France without free France. You don’t have European democracy.
The French Revolution in 1789. Paine published Common Sense in 1776.
Paine was also involved in the French revolution, but the Jacobins threw him into the Bastille because he was opposed in principle to capital punishment, so refused to vote to execute the king.
The pitfalls of typing things on your phone at work is that sometimes when you mean to say American revolution, you write French revolution twice because you’re only commenting while you’re waiting for something to happen at work and not giving your phone your full attention.
Do you have to try to be that disingenuous or does it come natural?
What a thing is trying to be is pretty irrelevant to what it is. A wife-beater can talk all he wants about how hard he’s trying to stop beating his wife, but meanwhile she’s got a fresh supply of new bruises every day. Whether or not he’s trying to stop, what he’s doing is beating his wife, so is he a wife-beater or is he a changed man? Here’s a hint in case it’s not as obvious to you as it is to everyone else: he’s still a wife-beater, but that doesn’t mean he should stop trying to change.
The fact that the US talked a big game about democracy does not make it a democracy, but that also doesn’t mean it should’ve stop trying to become one.